Closing summary
It is 6pm in Gaza, Tel Aviv and Beirut. We will be closing this blog soon, but you can stay up to date on the Guardian’s Israel-Gaza war coverage here and on the Middle East here.
Here is a recap of the latest developments:
The death toll from Friday’s Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb has climbed to 37, the Lebanese health ministry said on Saturday. The number includes three children and seven women. Lebanon’s health minister Firass Abiad told reporters on Saturday that 68 people were also injured of whom 15 remain in hospital. Hezbollah-aligned transport minister Ali Hamieh told reporters at the scene of Friday’s strike that at least 23 people were still missing.
Hezbollah said overnight that those killed on Friday, in the deadliest strike in a year of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, included 16 of its members, and that senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and another top commander, Ahmed Wahbi, were among the dead.
The Israeli army, in posts on X, said Friday’s strike in Beirut hit an underground gathering of Aqil and senior commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, and had “almost completely dismantled” Hezbollah’s military chain of command.
Heavy cross-border strikes continued on Saturday, with Israeli warplanes carrying some of its heaviest bombardment in 11 months of fighting across Lebanon’s south and Hezbollah claiming rocket attacks on military targets in Israel’s north. Hezbollah said it fired rockets at two military positions in northern Israel on Saturday, as the Israeli military said it was carrying out new strikes against Hezbollah targets. In separate statements, the Iran-backed group said it fired “a salvo of Katyusha rockets” each at two Israeli barracks “in response” to Israeli attacks “on steadfast southern villages and civilian houses”.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Saturday said he was worried about escalation between Israel and Lebanon. Sullivan, speaking with reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, said he still sees a path to a ceasefire in Gaza but that the US is “not at a point right now where we’re prepared to put something on the table”.
Cyprus’s president called for restraint over escalating tensions in the Middle East in separate telephone conversations with the Lebanese and Israeli prime ministers on Saturday, his spokesperson Konstantinos Letymbiotis said in a statement. Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides “expressed his strong concern” at the escalation of tension in the region said Letymbiotis.
Attacks on Lebanon this week showed that the Israeli government planned to spread the war to the region, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Saturday, calling on western countries to take “deterrent steps” against Israel’s actions. Erdoğan told a press conference on Saturday that Israel’s war in Gaza will top the agenda of his speech at the UN general assembly on Tuesday. “It is time for all countries with the mission of protecting world peace to come up with solutions that will stop Israel,” Erdoğan said.
Erdoğan also said he was prepared to meet with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, with whom Turkey severed relations in 2011, throwing its support behind rebels seeking to overthrow the Assad regime. Erdoğan said he was waiting for a response from Damascus in order to proceed with normalising ties.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Israel is committing “shameless crimes” against children, not combatants. Khamenei said Israel was not even hiding its different forms of “shameless crimes” in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. It is not combating “fighting men, but ordinary people,” Khamenei told a group of envoys from Muslim countries in Tehran in remarks broadcast on state TV.
Also on Saturday, in a show of strength, Iran unveiled its “jihad” single-stage liquid-fuel ballistic missile with a high-explosive detachable warhead and a range of 1,000 km, according to state TV. The missiles were displayed, along with other military hardware, during a parade marking the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 war with Iraq.
The dead from an Israeli strike on Saturday on a school turned shelter in the Palestinian territory’s largest city included “13 children and six women”, one of whom was pregnant, said civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal. The Gaza health ministry said at least 22 had died as a result of the strike. Israel’s military said in a statement that the air force had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command and control centre in Gaza City”. It said the target was “embedded inside” the Al Falah school, which is adjacent to the Al-Zaytoun school building which was hit.
At least 41,391 Palestinians have been killed and 95,760 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday. Gaza’s ministry of health does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, postponed his trip to the US by a day due to the security situation in the country’s north. Netanyahu was due to travel to New York on 24 September, during which he is expected to address the annual UN general assembly. He issued a short statement after the Beirut airstrike, saying: “Our goals are clear, and our actions speak for themselves.”
The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, denounced the pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon, saying that they violated international law and could constitute a war crime. The UN’s political affairs chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, warned that if violence continues between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, then “we risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far”.
Israeli soldiers have been filmed pushing three apparently lifeless bodies from a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Thursday. The incident took place in the town of Qabatiya in the northern West Bank, where the Israeli military has been carrying out large-scale raids since late August that the Palestinian health ministry says have killed dozens of people. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement: “This is a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.”
In the UK, several thousand people gathered in Liverpool city centre on Saturday to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and for the government to cease arms trading with Israel. Sky News reported that protesters carrying Palestinian flags and banners planned to march through the city centre towards the docks where the Labour party’s political conference will begin on Sunday. Organisers claimed it was the first ever national march for Palestine to take place outside London.
Here are some of the latest images that have been shared on the newswires today:
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Saturday said he was worried about escalation between Israel and Lebanon, reports Reuters.
Sullivan, speaking with reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, said he still sees a path to a ceasefire in Gaza but that the US is “not at a point right now where we’re prepared to put something on the table”.
Death toll from Beirut attack on Friday has reached 37, says Lebanese health ministry
The death toll from Friday’s Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb has climbed to 37, the Lebanese health ministry said on Saturday, according to Reuters. The number includes three children and seven women,
Hezbollah said overnight that those killed in the deadliest strike in a year of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel included 16 of its members, and that senior leader Ibrahim Aqil and another top commander, Ahmed Wahbi, were among the dead.
According to Reuters, the Israeli army, in posts on X, said the strike hit an underground gathering of Aqil and senior commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces, and had “almost completely dismantled” Hezbollah’s military chain of command.
Heavy cross-border strikes continued on Saturday, with Israeli warplanes carrying some of its heaviest bombardment in 11 months of fighting across Lebanon’s south and Hezbollah claiming rocket attacks on military targets in Israel’s north.
Reuters report that Friday’s strike sharply escalated the conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed group, and inflicted another blow on Hezbollah after two days of attacks this week in which pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members exploded. The total death toll in those attacks has risen to 39, and more than 3,000 were injured.
The attacks on communications devices were widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.
Hezbollah-aligned transport minister Ali Hamieh told reporters at the scene of Friday’s strike that at least 23 people were still missing. “The Israeli enemy is taking the region to war,” he said.
The ministry had dispatched vehicles and equipment to help rescuers dig through the collapsed buildings, reports Reuters. “We’ve been taking out women and children from under the rubble,” he said.
Updated
Turkey calls on west to take 'deterrent steps' against Israeli action
Attacks on Lebanon this week showed that the Israeli government planned to spread the war to the region, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Saturday, calling on western countries to take “deterrent steps” against Israel’s actions.
Erdoğan told a press conference that Israel’s war in Gaza will top the agenda of his speech at the UN general assembly on Tuesday, reports Reuters.
“In order for our region not to be dragged into a great disaster, the pressure on Israel must be increased even more,” Erdoğan told a press conference in Istanbul.
He was commenting on attacks in Lebanon this week, including the explosion of Hezbollah members’ pagers and walkie-talkies that killed 39 people.
The attacks on communications devices were widely believed to have been carried out by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.
“It is time for all countries with the mission of protecting world peace to come up with solutions that will stop Israel,” Erdoğan said.
“In order to end this oppression that has been going on for almost a year, to establish a permanent ceasefire and to ensure the unhindered flow of humanitarian aid, all of us, the whole world and especially the UN, have important duties,” he said.
Updated
Israeli soldiers filmed pushing bodies of Palestinians off West Bank roof
Israeli soldiers have been filmed pushing three apparently lifeless bodies from a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, in the latest in a series of suspected violations by Israeli forces since the start of the Israel-Hamas war that rights groups say show a pattern of excessive force toward Palestinians.
The incident took place in the town of Qabatiya in the northern West Bank, where the Israeli military has been carrying out large-scale raids since late August that the Palestinian health ministry says have killed dozens of people.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement:
This is a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.”
The IDF declined to comment when asked if the soldiers involved were being investigated.
The Associated Press (AP) said one of its journalists had witnessed the incident. The agency could not immediately confirm the identities or whereabouts of the bodies, nor the death toll from the Israeli raid.
Israel said its troops had killed seven militants on Thursday, four during a gun battle and three in an airstrike on a car carrying people who had fired at its soldiers. As of Friday, no militant group had claimed any of the dead as its fighters.
Ameed Shehadeh, a correspondent for Al-Arabi who also witnessed the incident, told CNN:
A bulldozer tried to demolish the house to bring the bodies down. That didn’t work. Soldiers went up and kicked and pushed the bodies off the roof, as we have seen.”
He said a fourth body had been thrown off an adjacent roof a few metres below.
You can read the full piece here:
The dead from an Israeli strike on Saturday on a school turned shelter in the Palestinian territory’s largest city included “13 children and six women”, one of whom was pregnant, said civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal.
Israel’s military said it targeted Hamas militants.
There were “around 30 injured, including nine children (needing) limb amputations, as a result of an Israeli bombing on Al-Zaytoun school C” in Gaza City, he said. Thousands of displaced people had sought shelter at the school, Bassal added.
Israel’s military said in a statement that the air force had “conducted a precise strike on terrorists who were operating inside a Hamas command and control centre in Gaza City”. It said the target was “embedded inside” the Al Falah school, which is adjacent to the Al-Zaytoun school buildings.
An Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporter at the scene confirmed that Al-Zaytoun school C had been hit.
Witnesses told AFP that before the strike, orphans had gathered there because they were due to receive sponsorship from a local NGO for humanitarian assistance.
Israel’s military did not provide a death toll but said “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence”.
It was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes on school buildings housing displaced people in Gaza.
A strike on the UN-run Al-Jawni school in central Gaza on 11 September drew international outcry after the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) said six of its staffers were among the 18 reported fatalities.
The Israeli military accuses Hamas of hiding in school buildings where many thousands of Palestinians have sought shelter – a charge denied by the Palestinian militant group.
Hezbollah says fired rockets at two north Israel barracks
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said it fired rockets at two military positions in northern Israel on Saturday, as the Israeli military said it was carrying out new strikes against Hezbollah targets, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
In separate statements, the Iran-backed group said it fired “a salvo of Katyusha rockets” each at two Israeli barracks “in response” to Israeli attacks “on steadfast southern villages and civilian houses”.
AFP correspondents reported heavy Israeli strikes in several areas of south Lebanon.
Hezbollah said on Saturday that it had fired rockets at two north Israel barracks, according to a report by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
More details soon …
Reuters reports that the Gaza health ministry said an Israeli strike on a school sheltering people in southern Gaza City took at least 22 lives on Saturday. Earlier, Gaza’s civil defence agency put the death toll at 17 (see 11.36am BST).
Israel said the attack was targeting a Hamas command centre. However, the Gaza health ministry said most of the victims were women and children.
The Hamas-run government media office said 13 children, including a three-month-old baby, and six women had died in the strike.
Updated
In the UK, several thousand people gathered in Liverpool city centre on Saturday to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and for the government to cease arms trading with Israel.
Sky News reports that protesters carrying Palestinian flags and banners plan to march through the city centre towards the docks where the Labour party’s political conference will begin on Sunday.
Organisers claim it is the first ever national march for Palestine to take place outside London.
Several thousand people have gathered in Liverpool to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 21, 2024
Sky's @ShingiMararike says it is the first pro-Palestinian national march to be held in the UK outside of London.
Live: https://t.co/mTq5w1zh7T
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/AdPru1FnRW
Updated
Iran's supreme leader says Israel is committing 'shameless crimes' against children
Reuters shared more details on comments by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Saturday (see 10.25am BST). He said that Israel is committing “shameless crimes” against children, not combatants.
His comments came a day after an Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese capital, Beirut, killed at least 31 people, including three children and seven women, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Friday’s strike, which, according to a source, targeted a building next to a nursery, was the deadliest in a year of conflict between Israel and the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah militia, reports Reuters.
It followed two days of attacks in which pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members exploded. Lebanon blamed the attacks on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.
Khamenei said Israel was not even hiding its different forms of “shameless crimes” in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.
It is not combating “fighting men, but ordinary people,” Khamenei told a group of envoys from Muslim countries in Tehran in remarks broadcast on state TV. He added:
Unable to hurt the real fighters in Palestine, they are venting their malicious anger on small children, on hospital patients, and on schools filled with young children.”
Also on Saturday, in a show of strength, Iran unveiled its “jihad” single-stage liquid-fuel ballistic missile with a high-explosive detachable warhead and a range of 1,000 km, according to state TV.
The missiles were displayed, along with other military hardware, during a parade marking the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 war with Iraq, reports Reuters.
Cyprus’s president called for restraint over escalating tensions in the Middle East in separate telephone conversations with the Lebanese and Israeli prime ministers on Saturday, his spokesperson said in a statement reported by Reuters.
The east Mediterranean island is the closest EU member state to the Middle East, and has good relations with both Lebanon and Israel. Cyprus was ready to act as a conduit for diplomacy as well as facilitate contacts between the sides, said spokesperson Konstantinos Letymbiotis.
Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides “expressed his strong concern” at the escalation of tension in the region in phone calls to Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, said Letymbiotis.
“He underlined the need for an immediate end to actions that may lead to further destabilisation but also have wider regional effects,” he said.
Christodoulides underscored the importance of solving disputes through dialogue and diplomacy, within the framework of UN resolutions and international law.
“To this end the president referred to the readiness of Cyprus to continue to be a conduit of such efforts, as well as contact between the sides on the basis of excellent relations with all countries in the region,” said Letymbiotis.
Earlier this year, Cyprus became a bridge in delivering badly needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. It has also said it would assist in an evacuation of civilians from the region if tensions were to escalate.
Updated
At least 16 Hezbollah militants were '“eliminated” in an Israeli strike in Beirut on Friday, an Israeli military spokesperson said on Saturday, according to Reuters.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said that Israel’s recent attacks in Lebanon have “proven our concerns about Israeli administration’s plans to spread war to region”.
Speaking at a press conference ahead of his flight to New York to participate in the UN general assembly, Erdoğan said the Middle East region faces an “inexplicably huge crisis”, calling on western countries begin taking deterrent steps against Israel.
Erdoğan also said he was prepared to meet with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, with whom Turkey severed relations in 2011, throwing its support behind rebels seeking to overthrow the Assad regime. Erdoğan said he was waiting for a response from Damascus in order to proceed with normalising ties.
Here are some of the latest images via the newswires showing the school turned shelter that Gaza’s civil defence agency say was hit by an Israeli strike on Saturday:
Gaza's civil defence agency says 17 killed in strike on school turned shelter
Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Saturday that an Israeli strike on a school turned shelter in the Palestinian territory’s largest city killed 17 people, while Israel’s army said it was targeting Hamas militants, reports Reuters.
“At least 17 martyrs, including eight children, and more than 30 injured, most of them children and women … following an Israeli rocket strike on Al-Zaytoun school” in Gaza City, agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal said, noting that thousands of displaced people had sought shelter at the school.
Further to the earlier report from Reuters, citing the Palestinian news agency Wafa, that an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in southern Gaza City had killed 14 people (10.56am BST), there are now also reports that a number of other people were injured in a separate strike that hit a school in the same neighbourhood.
Updated
At least 41,391 Palestinians killed in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, says health ministry
At least 41,391 Palestinians have been killed and 95,760 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday, according to Reuters.
Gaza’s ministry of health does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count.
The Palestinian news agency Wafa is reporting that at least 13 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in southern Gaza City.
The Guardian has been unable to independently verify the report.
Updated
Dozens of people were killed in Lebanon on Tuesday when electronic pagers blew up. The next day walkie-talkies exploded. William Christou reports from Beirut on how Lebanon’s pagers and walkie-talkies became deadly weapons in this epsiode of the Guardian’s Full Story podcast:
Updated
Reuters reports that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Saturday that Israel is committing “shameless crimes” against children, not combatants.
His comments came a day after an Israeli airstrike on the Lebanese capital, Beirut, killed 31 people, including three children and seven women, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Lebanon’s health minister Firass Abiad told reporters on Saturday that 68 people were also injured of whom 15 remain in hospital, in the Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb on Friday.
The death toll, which Abiad said totals at least 31 people, included Ibrahim Aqil, a Hezbollah commander who was in charge of the group’s elite Radwan forces, as well as about a dozen members of the militant group who were meeting in the basement of the building that was destroyed.
Israel launched the airstrike in the densely populated southern Beirut neighbourhood on Friday afternoon during rush hour as people returned home from work and students from schools. The Associated Press (AP) reports that on Saturday morning, Hezbollah’s media office took journalists on a tour of the scene of the airstrike where workers were still digging through the rubble.
According to the AP, Lebanese troops cordoned off the area preventing people from reaching the building that was knocked down as members of the Lebanese Red Cross stood nearby to take any recovered body from under the rubble.
Updated
At least 31 people were killed, including three children, in Beirut attack on Friday, says health ministry
At least 31 people were killed, including three children and seven women, in an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday, the Lebanese health ministry told a televised news conference on Saturday, according to Reuters.
It was previously believed that the strike had killed at least 14 people including a senior Hezbollah leader.
Updated
Netanyahu postpones US trip by a day due to security situation in northern Israel
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed by a day his scheduled departure to the US, where he is due to address the UN general assembly, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
On Friday the UN’s high commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, told the security council the attack on Hezbollah communications devices violated international law and could constitute a war crime.
The pagers and walkie-talkies exploded as their users were shopping in supermarkets, walking on streets and attending funerals, plunging Lebanon into panic.
“I am appalled by the breadth and impact of the attacks,” said Türk, adding that it “is a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians”.
International mediators, including the US, have been scrambling to stop the Gaza war from becoming an all-out regional conflict.
Updated
Israel ‘challenges’ international criminal court bid for Netanyahu arrest warrant
Israel has submitted an “official challenge” to a request from the international criminal court prosecutor for an arrest warrant against its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
In May the ICC’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, requested the court issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
“The state of Israel submitted today its official challenge to the ICC’s jurisdiction, as well as the legality of the prosecutor’s requests for arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and minister of defence,” the foreign ministry’s spokesperson, Oren Marmorstein, said on X.
The State of Israel submitted today its official challenge to the ICC’s jurisdiction, as well as the legality of the Prosecutor's requests for arrest warrants against Israel's Prime Minister and Minister of Defence.
— Oren Marmorstein (@OrenMarmorstein) September 20, 2024
Israel submitted two separate legal briefs. In one brief,… pic.twitter.com/ZR0b68GIxd
Khan also sought warrants against top Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The prosecutor dropped the application for Haniyeh on 2 August “because of the changed circumstances caused by Mr Haniyeh’s death” in Tehran on 31 July, the ICC said in a statement this month.
According to Israel, Deif was killed by a strike on 13 July in southern Gaza, though Hamas denies he is dead.
The court is still weighing Khan’s application for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Gallant.
The Guardian graphics team have created this map, which shows the airstrikes and artillery fire across the Israel-Lebanon border between 19-20 September 2024.
Updated
UN pleads against further violence after Israeli strike kills top Hezbollah leader
Further violence between Israel and Iran’s allies Hezbollah and Hamas could ignite a devastating regional conflict, the United Nations has warned, after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed at least 14 people including a senior Hezbollah leader and wounded 66.
Late on Friday, UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo said:
We risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far.”
Speaking at a meeting of the UN security council which had been convened to discuss Israel’s attacks, DiCarlo said:
It is not too late to avoid such folly. There is still room for diplomacy. I also strongly urge member states with influence over the parties to leverage it now.”
Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, repeated Washington’s assertions that the US had played no role in the attacks and called on all parties to “refrain from any actions which could plunge the region into a devastating war”.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, had earlier said Israel’s attacks would continue, writing on X:
The sequence of actions in the new phase will continue until our goal is achieved: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes.”
You can read more of the report by William Christou in Beirut and Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem here:
Here is a video report on the Israeli airstrike on a residential building in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Friday. In total, 14 were killed and at least 66 injured.
Updated
Explainer: who was Ibrahim Aqil?
The Guardian’s international security correspondent, Jason Burke, has written a profile of Ibrahim Aqil who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday. Here is an extract:
Aqil, who was in his early 60s, had risen through the ranks and reached a senior position in the organisation. Exact details of his role are unclear, but the Israel Defense Forces described him as “the head of the Hezbollah terrorist organization’s operations team, the acting commander of the Radwan [special forces] unit”.
“He was one of the really senior old-timers but was never really the face of anything. He was always a number two or number three, but had just been promoted in the last five to 10 years,” said Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington and an expert on extremism in Lebanon.
Aqil was one of a group of young Shia men originally from the south of Lebanon but living in Beirut who were energised by the 1979 Iranian revolution and recruited by the country’s Revolutionary Guards into a network known initially as Islamic Jihad and then later as Hezbollah.
Their military aim, guided by their Iranian mentors, was to fight the US, which had dispatched a peacekeeping force to Beirut; and Israel, which had occupied much of Lebanon. Their political objective was to turn Lebanon into an Islamic state aligned with Tehran. Almost all have been killed since, probably by Israel.
You can read the full profile here:
Updated
Hezbollah confirms death of Ibrahim Aqil
Hezbollah has confirmed the death of Ibrahim Aqil, who sits on the group’s top military body and is wanted by the US in connection with the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing. Aqil was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday, along with several other members of the elite Radwan unit, which under his leadership was designed to conduct cross-border raids into Israel.
The group also said Ahmed Wahbi, a commander who oversaw the military operations of the Radwan unit during the Gaza war until early 2024, was also killed in the strike.
In its statement, Hezbollah said that Aqil led a “blessed life of jihad”.
In total, 14 were killed and at least 66 injured by the Israeli airstrike on a residential building in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Paramedics worked late into the night to retrieve survivors and bodies from under the rubble of the collapsed building.
Friday’s strike on Beirut came amid a sharp escalation by Israel of attacks against Hezbollah. At least 42 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured this week when explosives inserted into pagers and walkie-talkies commonly used by Hezbollah members were remotely detonated.
On Wednesday, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said the war with Hezbollah was entering a new phase and that the “centre of gravity” had shifted to fighting in northern Israel.
Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
Israel submitted formal challenges to the international criminal court (ICC) on Friday over its jurisdiction and the legality of arrest warrant requests against Israeli leaders for their conduct of the Gaza war. In May the ICC’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, requested the court issue arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. “The state of Israel submitted today its official challenge to the ICC’s jurisdiction, as well as the legality of the prosecutor’s requests for arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and minister of defence,” the foreign ministry’s spokesperson, Oren Marmorstein, said on X. Khan also sought warrants against top Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The White House said it had seen “deeply disturbing” footage of Israeli soldiers pushing three apparently lifeless bodies from a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Thursday. The incident took place in the town of Qabatiya in the northern West Bank, where the Israeli military has been carrying out large-scale raids since late August that the Palestinian health ministry says have killed dozens of people. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement: “This is a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.” The IDF declined to comment when asked if the soldiers involved were being investigated.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has postponed his trip to the US by a day due to the security situation in the country’s north. Netanyahu was due to travel to New York on 24 September, during which he is expected to address the annual UN general assembly. He issued a short statement after the Beirut airstrike, saying: “Our goals are clear, and our actions speak for themselves.”
The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, denounced the pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon, saying that they violated international law and could constitute a war crime. The UN’s political affairs chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, warned that if violence continues between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, then “we risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far”.
The UK’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, discussed preparations to evacuate remaining Britons from Lebanon, having already urged UK nationals to leave the country given the hostilities with Israel. The White House said Americans were strongly urged not to travel to Lebanon or to leave if they are already there.
The US president, Joe Biden, said a ceasefire deal in Gaza was still realistic amid the escalating tensions in the region. “We’re going to keep at it until we get it done, but we’ve got a way to go,” Biden said in his first comments on the situation since the wave of explosions targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
