Israel Kills Top Hezbollah Official

In the most aggressive strike by Israel against Hezbollah since the November 2024 ceasefire, an IDF airstrike on Sunday killed Hezbollah military commander Ali Tabatabai in the heart of Beirut.

Hezbollah confirmed Tabatabai's death in a statement on Sunday, saying that "they [the Mujahideen] will advance with strength and courage to overthrow all the projects of the Zionist enemy and its patron, America."

Four other Hezbollah terrorists were also killed in the strike, the terror group announced on Sunday evening.

Throughout the last year, the air force has targeted multiple rank-and-file Hezbollah operatives each week who tried to sneak into southern Lebanon or otherwise were acting to rebuild its rocket threat against Israel.

However, those attacks were almost always against lower-ranked terrorists who were “in the act,” not the top military commander who was nowhere near the front but was more indirectly responsible as Hezbollah’s military mastermind.

Also, the IDF has rarely attacked in Beirut since the ceasefire and not in months.

At press time, there was no sign that Hezbollah would launch an immediate major counterattack on Israel.

However, Israel is concerned that Hezbollah may counterattack in the near or medium term, and the Lebanese terror group retains tens of thousands of rockets and mortars from its pre-war 150,000-rocket arsenal. This means that Hezbollah could still likely shoot anywhere from dozens to several hundred rockets per day on Israel, especially the northern third of the country, including Haifa, if it chooses to.
IDF sources, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Israel Katz explained that they targeted Tabatabai because less aggressive measures over the last year had failed to prevent Hezbollah from continuing its process of rearming to threaten Israel.

In addition, though IDF officials gave the Lebanese army significant credit for rolling back Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in early 2025, as the year drew out, they found that the army failed to achieve any significant disarmament of the terror organization beyond Lebanon’s south.

Top IDF officials are concerned that if they do not draw a line in the sand now against Hezbollah rearmament, the Lebanese terror group will achieve the same massive rocket arsenal it had pre-war – which was exactly what happened after the 2006 Second Lebanon War when Hezbollah violated rules by rearming, and Israel did not intervene.

Israeli officials indicated they were not planning to escalate further against Hezbollah any more than they already have, provided that Hezbollah does not respond. Yet, given Tabatabai’s high rank, it is hard to see Hezbollah not responding at all, as opposed to them waiting for a more opportune moment.

Though Tabatabai was Hezbollah’s military chief, he had only held that rank since late 2024.

Until July 2024, for many years, the Hezbollah military chief had been Fuad Shukr.

The Israel Air Force killed him in July 2024 in response to Hezbollah rockets killing around a dozen Israeli Druze in Majdal Shams.

In September 2024, the IAF also killed Ibrahim Aqil, who was the next highest-ranked Hezbollah military official.

After his removal and after Hezbollah’s leader for decades, Hassan Nasrallah, was also killed by the air force in the same time period, Tabatabai emerged as the next military chief.

Naim Qassem remains Hezbollah’s leader, having replaced Nasrallah (after Hashem Saffiedine was also killed within days of Nasrallah), but is considered to have less military experience than his predecessor.

IDF strikes Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, kills two

The IDF had earlier confirmed that it had struck “a key Hezbollah terrorist” in the Lebanese capital.
“Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu ordered the strike on the recommendation of the defense minister and the IDF chief of staff,” the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed in a post to X/Twitter on Sunday afternoon.

The strike targeted a hidden apartment belonging to Tabatabai in Beirut.

At least 25 have been reportedly wounded and three reportedly killed in the strike, according to Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese outlet Al-Mayadeen.

The IDF also allegedly struck in the Bekaa Valley in southern Lebanon, Qatari state-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera reported on Sunday.

US sources claim they were not notified of the strikes until they were happening, despite earlier Israeli officials saying that the US had been told in advance. “All the talk that ‘we must receive approvals for this’ from one source or another is simply an absolute lie,” Netanyahu said in a statement to the security cabinet on Sunday morning.

“We operate independently of anyone. Immediate actions to thwart attacks are taken by the IDF automatically,” he said. “As for the responses, that goes through the defense minister and eventually reaches me, and we decide independently of any factor, and that is how it should be.”

“Israel is responsible for its own security,” he added.

Despite Netanyahu’s statement of independence, throughout the war, he refrained from various military moves against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran under pressure from either the Biden administration or the Trump administration.

Further, each of the three ceasefires with Hamas, including the one in October, which appears to have ended the war, was at least partially imposed by Washington.

The IDF’s strike on Tabatabai followed a number of Saturday strikes on Hezbollah launchers and military sites in southern Lebanon.

“The IDF struck several Hezbollah launchers that were recently identified and placed in military sites in southern Lebanon,” the military said on Saturday. “In an additional strike in the Bekaa area, the IDF struck two Hezbollah military sites in which activity of terrorists was identified, including weapons storage facilities and additional military structures.”