Israel has assassinated a seventh senior Hezbollah official

The Israeli military said Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of Hezbollah’s Central Council, was killed on Saturday.

Hezbollah confirmed his death, making him the seventh senior Hezbollah leader assassinated in Israeli strikes in a little over a week. They include founding members who had evaded death or detention for decades.

The Israeli military said it carried out another targeted strike on Beirut later on Sunday, with details to follow.

Hezbollah had earlier confirmed that Ali Karaki, another senior commander, died in Friday’s strike that killed Nasrallah. The Israeli military said earlier that Karaki was killed in the airstrike, which targeted an underground compound in Beirut where Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah figures were meeting.

Israel said at least 20 other Hezbollah militants were killed in the strike, including two close associates of Nasrallah, one of whom was in charge of his security detail.

Wreckage from the strike was still smouldering more than two days later. On Sunday, Associated Press journalists saw smoke over the rubble as people flocked to the site, some to check on what’s left of their homes and others to pay respects, pray or simply to see the destruction.

Hezbollah has also been targeted by a sophisticated attack on its pagers and walkie-talkies that was widely blamed on Israel. A wave of Israeli airstrikes across large parts of Lebanon has killed at least 1,030 people — including 156 women and 87 children — in less than two weeks, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been driven from their homes in Lebanon by the latest strikes. The government estimates that around 250,000 are in shelters, with three to four times as many staying with friends or relatives, or camping out on the streets, Environment Minister Nasser Yassin told the AP.

Hezbollah has continued to fire rockets and missiles into northern Israel, but most have been intercepted or fallen in open areas. No Israelis have been killed since the latest wave of strikes targeting top Hezbollah leaders began on Sept. 20.

Kaouk was a veteran member of Hezbollah going back to the 1980s and served as Hezbollah’s military commander in southern Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel. He often appeared in local media, where he would comment on politics and security developments, and he gave eulogies at the funerals of senior militants. The United States announced sanctions against him in 2020.

Hezbollah began firing rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Hezbollah and Hamas are allies that consider themselves part of an Iran-backed “Axis of Resistance” against Israel.

Israel has responded with waves of airstrikes, and the conflict has steadily ratcheted up to the brink of all-out war, raising fears of a region-wide conflagration.

Israel says it is determined to return some 60,000 of its citizens to communities in the north that were evacuated nearly a year ago. Hezbollah has said it will only halt its rocket fire if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, which has proven elusive despite months of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas led by the United States, Qatar and Egypt.

US airstrikes in Syria

In Syria, 37 militants affiliated to the extremist Islamic State group and an al-Qaeda-linked group were killed in two strikes, the United States military said on Sunday.

Two of the dead were senior militants, it said.

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U.S. Central Command said it struck north-western Syria on Tuesday, targeting a senior militant from the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Deen group and eight others. They say he was responsible for overseeing military operations.

They also announced a strike from earlier this month on Sept. 16, where they conducted a “large-scale airstrike” on an IS training camp in a remote undisclosed location in central Syria. That attack killed 28 militants, including “at least four Syrian leaders.”

“The airstrike will disrupt ISIS’ capability to conduct operations against U.S. interests, as well as our allies and partners,” the statement read.

There are some 900 U.S. forces in Syria, along with an undisclosed number of contractors, mostly trying to prevent any comeback by the extremist IS group, which swept through Iraq and Syria in 2014, taking control of large swaths of territory.

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U.S. forces advise and assist their key allies in north-eastern Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, located not far from strategic areas where Iran-backed militant groups are present, including a key border crossing with Iraq.