Smoke billows over Beirut southern suburbs after a strike, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Sin El Fil, Lebanon October 8, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israeli forces have killed the would-be successors of late Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday, without naming them.

“We have degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. We took out thousands of terrorists, including Nasrallah himself and Nasrallah’s replacement, and the replacement of the replacement,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a pre-recorded video message.

Mr. Netanyahu did not identify by name Nasrallah’s replacement that he claimed Israel had killed.

A Hezbollah official said on Sunday that Israel was obstructing search and rescue efforts in an area where Nasrallah’s potential successor Hashem Safieddine is thought to have been when Israel bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs on Thursday.

Israel killed Nasrallah in a September air strike on Beirut.

Earlier on Tuesday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Nasrallah’s replacement had probably been “eliminated”.

It was not immediately clear who Netanyahu meant in his comments by the “replacement of the replacement”.

“Today, Hezbollah is weaker than it has been for many, many years,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his video message, which was directed at the people of Lebanon.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel last Oct. 8, a day after Hamas Palestinian militants attacked southern Israel from Gaza. Hezbollah cited solidarity with Hamas.

Some 60,000 Israeli citizens in the country’s north have been forced to leave their homes, while Israel’s stated objective is to make its northern areas safe from Hezbollah rocket fire and allow those displaced residents to return.

“Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel also has a right to win. And Israel will win,” Netanyahu said.

He urged Lebanon to “take back your country” and return it to a path of peace and prosperity and take advantage of an opportunity that hasn’t existed in decades.

“If you don’t, Hezbollah will continue to try to fight Israel from densely populated areas at your expense. It doesn’t care if Lebanon is dragged into a wider war,” he added. “Christians, Druze, Muslims — Sunnis and Shiites — all of you are suffering because of Hezbollah’s futile war against Israel.

“Don’t let these terrorists destroy your future any more than they’ve already done,” Netanyahu added. “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

An Israeli police officer stands by as a firefighter as he puts out a fire after a rocket fired from Lebanon into Israel hit a residential house, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, in Rosh Pina, on September 26, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Out buying groceries in the northern town of Rosh Pina near the border, Matan Sofer had mixed feelings after Israel killed the head of Hezbollah, which fires rockets daily into Israel.

“I feel uncertain — we don’t know when this is going to end,” Sofer, 24, told AFP.

Israel airstrike LIVE updates

Hassan Nasrallah, who headed Hezbollah for more than 30 years, was killed in a Friday air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs that Israel’s military said killed more than 20 other members of the group.

“Nasrallah was responsible for the deaths of many Israelis, so it is good news,” said Sofer, who also feared the outbreak of a wider regional war.

“But do we risk it getting worse, who knows?” he said.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah launched low-intensity cross-border strikes targeting Israeli troops after its Palestinian ally Hamas attacked Israel last October 7, sparking the Gaza war.

Down a colourful alley in Rosh Pina, one of its 3,000 residents, Batia Yelloz, rejoiced at the news that the Lebanese commander had been killed.

“May he go to hell,” said the 93-year-old who has lived in the town for seven decades and whose home was hit by rocket fire on Thursday.

Pointing to smashed flower pots, Yelloz said she was lucky to survive the strike, but saddened by the damage it caused to her home and to others.

Nearby cars and houses were also hit.

The past week’s waves of Israeli strikes targeting Hezbollah, a powerful political, military and social force in Lebanon, have intensified fears of more violence to come.

But residents of the leafy settlement of Rosh Pina still went about their daily business on Sunday, filling shops and restaurants.

‘Beginning of the end?’

Eva Cohen, 57, was evacuated in early October from the border city of Kiryat Shmona some seven kilometres (four miles) from the border.

Hezbollah has targeted Kiryat Shmona for the past year, and Cohen now works at a jeweller’s in Rosh Pina.

World leaders have been calling for at least a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, but Cohen believes it is too soon to end the war.

“It’s not over,” she said, sitting at a cafe with a friend.

“There are still many terrorists. We will return home when it is completely secure. Regardless of how long it takes, we’re patient.”

Her friend Simi Vaknin, 69, who is also from Kiryat Shmona, said her job pushed her to stay there despite the rocket fire, after the great majority of residents fled.

She is a municipal employee, and said she felt an obligation to help the hundreds of families who had remained in the city.

“It’s a ghost town. We shop for groceries and rush to a shelter,” said Vaknin. “It’s terrible.”

“I have faith in the army,” she said. “It will know whether to continue the war or end it.

“We don’t know what will happen to us — we can only hope things will get better.”

Military vehicles and reservists could be seen on a road downhill from Rosh Pinna. A few kilometres out of town, dozens of Israeli armoured vehicles manoeuvred in a field.

The Israeli army had on Wednesday called up two reservist brigades “for operational missions in the northern arena”.

On Sunday afternoon, the air raid sirens wailed once more in Rosh Pinna and in cities in northern Israel.

“Is it the beginning of the end? The risk of a new escalation? I’m confused, I really don’t know what tomorrow will look like,” said Sofer.

Smoke rises near the Israel-Lebanon border, after Hezbollah fired projectiles towards Israel from Lebanon, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in northern Israel, September 12, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The Lebanese Health Ministry said a child was among three people killed in an Israeli strike in the country’s south on Thursday (September 12, 2024), amid ongoing exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah.

Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group has been trading near-daily cross-border fire with Israeli forces since Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, sparking war in the Gaza Strip.

The Lebanese Health Ministry said an “Israeli enemy strike” hit the village of Kfarjouz near Nabatieh, around 10 kilometres (six miles) from the border with Israel.

The strike killed “three people, among them a child, and wounded three others”, the Ministry said, without providing further details.

A source close to Hezbollah confirmed that one of the dead was “a fighter in Hezbollah” and the two others were “civilians”.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the strike “targeted two motorcycles on the Nabatieh-Kfarjouz road”, adding that a passing car was also hit.

In a statement posted to Telegram early Friday, Hezbollah said it had fired a barrage of Katyusha rockets at Israel’s Northern Command “in response to the attack and assassination carried out” in Kfarjouz.

The Israeli military said shortly after that “approximately 20 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon into Israeli territory” around Safed, where the Northern Command is based.

“Most were successfully intercepted, the rest fell in open areas,” the army said in a statement, adding that no injuries were reported but teams were working to “extinguish the fire that erupted due to a fall in the area”.

Earlier Thursday, Hezbollah said it had launched a number of attacks on military positions in northern Israel, some with drones.

The Israeli military said at the time that “approximately 15 projectiles” were identified crossing from Lebanon, with some intercepted and no casualties reported.

The cross-border violence since early October has killed about 622 people in Lebanon, mostly fighters but also including at least 142 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

On the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, authorities have announced the deaths of at least 24 soldiers and 26 civilians.

Beirut, Lebanon:

Israeli airstrikes across southern Lebanon on Friday killed at least six fighters and one child, according to security sources, as armed group Hezbollah responded with artillery rounds and rockets across the border.

The Israeli military has been trading fire with Iran-backed Hezbollah across Lebanon’s southern border in parallel with the Gaza war, with hostilities ramping up recently amid fears that a full-scale regional war could erupt.

Israeli strikes on the southern Lebanese towns of Mays al-Jabal and Tayr Harfa on Friday killed four Hezbollah fighters, according to the party’s death notices and a security source.

Another fighter was killed in a separate strike outside Aitarun, according to the security source. It was not immediately clear if the combatant was a Hezbollah member.

A separate Israeli strike on the village of Aita, approximately 14 km (nine miles) north of the border with Israel, killed a Hezbollah fighter and a child, the security source told Reuters. Hezbollah identified the fighter killed in Aita as Mohammad Najem.

The Israeli military, in a statement posted online, said it had targeted Najem in Aita because he was a member of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile unit. It said it had targeted two other Hezbollah fighters across the south.

Its statement said “a number of projectiles fired from Lebanese territory” had crossed into northern Israel but that no injuries were reported.

Hezbollah’s press office said the group had fired rockets and artillery fire onto various Israeli military positions throughout the day.

More than 600 people in Lebanon have been killed since the start of the clashes last October, including more than 400 Hezbollah combatants and over 130 civilians, according to a Reuters toll.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)