Because the Iranian minister met with Lebanese and Hezbollah officers in Beirut, Israel continued to select off high Hezbollah commanders with airstrikes.
Hashem Safieddine, seen as Nasrallah’s almost definitely successor, was presumably among the many lifeless in a sequence punishing Israeli assaults on the southern suburbs of Beirut this week. Israeli officers say they’re nonetheless attempting to substantiate whether or not Safieddine was in a Hezbollah intelligence headquarters close to Beirut’s airport when it was struck.
Together with Hezbollah leaders, Israel has additionally been concentrating on Hamas commanders primarily based in Lebanon. On Saturday, Hamas-affiliated media reported that Saeed Atallah, one of many leaders of al-Qassam brigades, a navy wing of Hamas, was killed in an Israeli strike on a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
The defiant remarks by Araghchi had been in line with these made simply hours earlier by Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who in a fiery sermon at Friday prayers in Tehran justified Iran’s ballistic missile strike towards Israel, saying it was “completely authorized and legit” and a “minimal punishment for Zionist crimes.”
Often greedy the barrel of a rifle propped by his facet, Khamenei promised Israel will “by no means defeat Hamas and Hezbollah,” including that the Iran-backed teams “is not going to again down.” The final time Khamenei carried out Friday prayers was almost 5 years in the past after the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the chief of Iran’s elite paramilitary forces, in a U.S. drone strike.
In the meantime, the Israel Protection Forces (IDF) stated the Isaeli navy on Saturday struck Hezbollah operatives at a command middle inside a mosque in southern Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil, throughout the Martyr Salah Ghandour Hospital compound. The IDF stated the drone strike was “exact” and primarily based on intelligence.
Earlier than finishing up the strike, the IDF despatched textual content messages to the residents and referred to as up officers in close by villages, “demanding that every one acts of terror carried out on the hospital stop instantly,” it stated.