Tension Mounts Over Israel’s Killing Hezbollah Commander, Ibrahim Aqil

With the official confirmation that veteran Hezbollah Military Commander, Ibrahim Aqil was killed in an Israeli airstrike during a meeting in Beirut’s suburbs, tension is now mounting in the Middle East over a possible escalation of violence into full-scale hostilities between the warring parties.

The attack, which targeted Hezbollah’s stronghold and resulted in three deaths and 17 injuries, marks the third time since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, shifting focus from Gaza to Lebanon.

Speaking amid the heightened tension, Lebanese Health Minister, Firass Abiad said despite successfully dealing with two massive attacks in one week, the future looks bleak as Friday’s attack brought the possibility of a country-wide war with Israel ever closer.

Abiad, while claiming that; “The health sector in Lebanon has been tested and has always been found able to respond” said; “The Lebanese health sector is really a resilient health system. Does this mean that we need to keep putting it through the test? I hope not, and I hope we never find out which crisis will be sufficient to bring it to its knees”.

In the United Kingdom (UK), the 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.

He repeated the Foreign Office’s warning to British nationals, urging them to leave Lebanon “while commercial options remain”, as the situation “could deteriorate rapidly”.

According to reports on the Israeli strike, Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah operations commander killed on Friday, had a $7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed more than 300 people at the American embassy and a US Marines barracks.

Two security sources in Lebanon, which confirmed the veteran fighter’s death took place in Beirut’s southern suburbs during a meeting of the elite Radwan unit of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group, said Aqil, who has also used the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader, was the second member of Hezbollah’s top military body, the Jihad Council, to be killed in two months after an Israeli strike in the same area targeted Fuad Shukr in July.

Like Shukr, Aqil is a veteran of Hezbollah, which was founded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the early 1980s to battle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.

Born in a village in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley sometime around 1960, Aqil had joined the other big Lebanese political movement, Amal, before switching to Hezbollah as a founding member, according to a security source.

The United States accused him of a role in the Beirut truck bombings at the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and a US Marine barracks six months later that killed 241 people.

Referring to the bombing of the US Marine barracks and other attacks on Western interests in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a 2022 interview with an Arabic broadcaster that they were carried out by small groups not linked to Hezbollah.

But a US Justice Department notice described Aqil as “a principal member of Hizballah’s terrorist cell the Islamic Jihad Organization”, which claimed responsibility for the two 1983 bombings in Beirut. The notice also says Aqil directed the taking of US and German hostages in Lebanon and held them there, also in the 80s, even as it listed him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2019, putting a $7 million bounty on his head.

Aqil’s cohort of founding Hezbollah operatives helped turn the group from a shadowy militia into Lebanon’s most powerful military and political organisation, pushing Israel from its occupation of the south in 2000 and fighting it again in 2006.

When Shukr was killed in July, it was seen as the heaviest blow to its command structure since the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, remembered by Hezbollah as a legendary commander but by Israel and the United States as a terrorist. – (Mugniyeh was most prominent member of the original group was Imad Mugniyeh, who was blamed for dozens of lethal attacks on US, Israeli, and Jewish targets over 25 years and died in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus in 2008 that was attributed to the Mossad.)

“Aqil was one of the nucleus of five people around Mugniyeh who were there at the start of the whole Hezbollah military enterprise”, according to Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington and an expert on extremism in Lebanon.

Coming so soon after the extraordinary pager explosions which killed 37 people and injured thousands of ordinary Hezbollah operatives, the strike on Aqil, Aqil, whose bounty was set by the United States at an even higher value than that of Shukr’s, suggests a concentrated and urgent Israeli effort to eliminate the organisation’s higher command.

Hezbollah will find it hard to replace men such as Shukr and Aqil, and their assassinations are likely to demoralise even committed senior members. Both men were reportedly close to the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. – With agency reports