Hezbollah chief of staff killed in Beirut airstrike, Israeli military says

Israel targeted one of Hezbollah’s most senior military commanders in an airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sunday, dramatically escalating tensions with the group almost exactly a year after a ceasefire ended 14 months of clashes.
The Israeli military said several hours after the attack that Haytham Ali Tabatabai, Hezbollah’s chief of staff, was killed in the strike in Lebanese capital.

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Lebanon’s health ministry said the attack killed at least five people and wounded 28. The official national news agency said three missiles were fired at the building.
Late on Sunday, Hezbollah confirmed “the great commander” Tabatabai had been killed in “a treacherous Israeli attack on the Haret Hreik area in the southern suburbs of Beirut”, without specifying his position within the group.
Videos showed damaged buildings in the densely populated Haret Hreik area of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold.
Israel has launched increasingly frequent airstrikes in southern Lebanon this month, which it says are intended to thwart a military revival by Hezbollah in the hills north of the de facto border.
The campaign is also designed to increase pressure on the Lebanese authorities and army to move faster to disarm the organisation, a key requirement of last year’s ceasefire deal.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told his cabinet before the strike that Israel would continue to fight “terrorism” on several fronts. “We will continue to do whatever is necessary to prevent Hezbollah from reestablishing its ability to threaten us,” he said.
After the strike, his office said in a statement: “In the heart of Beirut, the IDF attacked the Hezbollah chief of staff, who had been leading the terrorist organisation’s buildup and rearmament. Israel is determined to act to achieve its objectives everywhere and at all times.”
A senior US official said Israel did not notify Washington in advance about the strike, according to an Axios reporter who posted on X.
They cited the official as saying the Trump administration was informed immediately after the strike, and a second senior official as saying Washington had known for days that Israel was planning to escalate strikes in Lebanon.

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Tabatabai, 58, who joined Hezbollah as a teenager soon after its foundation in the early 1980s, escaped an Israeli assassination attempt in 2015. The US imposed sanctions on him a year later, identifying him as the commander of the group’s special forces in Syria and Yemen, and offering a reward of as much as $5m (£3.8m) for information leading to his detention.
Tabatabai led elite Hezbollah fighters in support of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and is thought to have tutored Houthi forces in Yemen. The Houthis and Hezbollah have close relationships with Iran.
Tabatabai escaped Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah’s senior commanders during the 2023-24 war triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 incursion into southern Israel. An Israeli airstrike in Beirut in September 2024 killed the group’s veteran leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and by the time of the ceasefire some weeks later almost it entire military leadership had been killed.
Hezbollah says it has abided by requirements for it to end its military presence in the border region near Israel, and for the Lebanese army to deploy there.
The Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, called on the international community to intervene firmly to stop Israeli attacks on the country. Beirut “reiterates its call to the international community to assume its responsibility and intervene firmly and seriously to stop the attacks on Lebanon and its people”, he said in a statement.
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper told readers last week that the “immediate flash point” was “now in Lebanon, not Gaza”, while Amit Segal, a journalist close to Netanyahu’s coalition government, said “a dramatic escalation against Hezbollah” was “more likely than not”.