Hezbollah source says contact ‘lost’ with top figure Hashem Safieddine

A high-level Hezbollah source said on Saturday that contact with Hashem Safieddine, widely touted as potentially the group’s next leader, had been lost following Israeli strikes on Lebanon this week. “Contact with … Safieddine has been lost since the violent strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs” early on Friday, the official told Agence France-Presse. “We don’t know if he was at the targeted site, or who may have been there with him,” he added. A second source close to Hezbollah also confirmed that communication had been cut off with Safieddine and that his whereabouts were unknown. Hezbollah “is trying to reach the underground headquarters that were targeted, but every single time Israel starts striking again to impede rescue efforts”, he said. Safieddine “was with Hezbollah’s head of intelligence”, known as Hajj Murtada, when the strikes took place, he said. Both sources requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Hezbollah said it launched rockets at a defence company in northern Israel on Saturday, the latest attacks after Israel intensified its bombing campaign last week. The Iran-backed group said in a statement that it launched “a rocket salvo” towards a “military industries company” east of Acre. On Friday, a source close to Hezbollah said Israel had conducted 11 consecutive strikes on the group’s south Beirut stronghold. Agence France-Presse footage showed giant balls of flame and thick smoke rising from the site that was attacked. Israel’s military said it had hit “targets belonging to Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters in Beirut”. The Israeli military said its forces had killed more than 400 Hezbollah fighters since Israel launched ground operations inside southern Lebanon on Monday. “Since the beginning of the [ground] manoeuvre, forces have eliminated some 440 terrorists from the ground and from the air, including 30 commanders of various ranks,” military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a televised briefing. Hagari said Israel’s forces were on high alert ahead of the October 7 anniversary, saying militants were seeking to attack “the home front”. “This week we will mark the anniversary of the war and October 7. We are prepared with increased forces in anticipation for this day. They will try to carry out attacks on the home front,” Hagari said at a televised briefing. Saturday’s attack came a week after the Israeli military said it killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in air strikes on the group’s headquarters in south Beirut. Hezbollah has not yet named a new chief. Israel, meanwhile, was preparing a military response to Iran’s missile attack this week that heightened fears of a wider regional war, an Israeli official said on Saturday. In its second-ever direct attack on its regional foe, the Islamic republic which backs armed groups across the Middle East on Tuesday launched about 200 missiles at Israel in revenge for a spate of Israeli killings of militant leaders. The missile attack, which killed one person in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, caused some damage to an Israeli airbase according to satellite images. It came on the day Israeli ground forces began raids into Lebanon after days of intense strikes on Hezbollah strongholds across Lebanon, transforming nearly a year of cross-border exchanges with the Iran-backed militants into full-blown war. The Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to discuss the issue publicly, said the army “is preparing a response to the unprecedented and unlawful Iranian attack”. He did not elaborate on the nature or timing of the response, which analysts and Israeli media said would likely be designed to deal an immense blow to Iran, despite international calls for de-escalation and warnings from Tehran it would retaliate. Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, told Agence Framce-Presse that both Israel and Iran were “taking huge gambles”. “Everything right now hinges on Israel’s response,” he said. Rapidly escalating violence this week also included intensifying Hezbollah rocket fire and strikes on Israel claimed by allies of Iran from as far away as Yemen, just before the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 unprecedented attack on Israel which triggered war in Gaza. Nearly a year into the Gaza war, Israel shifted its focus north, saying it aims to allow tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by Hezbollah attacks to return home. Hezbollah said on Saturday its fighters were confronting Israeli troops in Lebanon’s southern border region, where the Israeli military said it struck militants inside a mosque in Bint Jbeil, a focus of this week’s fighting. The Israeli military said its forces were engaged in “limited, localised” raids in southern Lebanon, though the scale of their operations was not immediately clear. The army reported frequent rocket fire from Lebanon, some of which was intercepted by air defences, as Hezbollah claimed a rocket attack on northern Israel’s Ramat David airbase, about 45km (30 miles) from the frontier. In the first reported Israeli air strike on the northern Tripoli region in the current escalation, Hamas said “Zionist bombardment” of the Beddawi refugee camp killed one of its commanders, Saeed Attallah Ali, as well as his wife and two daughters on Saturday. In downtown Beirut, Ibrahim Nazzal, who is among hundreds of thousands displaced by the violence, said: “We want the war to stop … all our homes are gone.” Across Lebanon, an intensified wave of strikes on Hezbollah strongholds killed more than 1,110 people since September 23, according to the health ministry. The state-run National News Agency said that about a dozen strikes hit the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs overnight, with a fresh raid on Saturday around midday. It also reported more Israeli strikes in Lebanon’s south and east.

Hezbollah source says contact ‘lost’ with top figure Hashem Safieddine

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}‘Contact with … Safieddine has been lost since the violent strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs’ on Friday, a Hezbollah official said

‘Contact with … Safieddine has been lost since the violent strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs’ on Friday, a Hezbollah official said