Israel Targets Hezbollah as Khamenei, Iran’s Leader, Warns of Retaliation

Less than a week after Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli warplanes bombarded areas south of Beirut around midnight on Thursday, this time targeting his presumed successor.

It was unclear on Friday whether the strikes in Lebanon had succeeded in killing the group’s potential next leader, Hashem Safeiddine, who is also a cousin of Mr. Nasrallah’s. And it was difficult to assess the scale of the damage from the bombardment, described as the heaviest of the rapidly escalating war in Lebanon.

But it was clear from the images of destroyed buildings, now merely broken concrete and twisted metal, along with Israel’s ground invasion in the south, that Israel was determined to take the fight against Hezbollah to a new level.

It’s doing so not just in southern Lebanon, where its ground invasion is seeking to halt Hezbollah’s rocket fire into northern Israel, but also with its systematic targeting of the Iran-backed group’s remaining leaders, whose movements Israeli intelligence apparently still track.

Many people in Lebanon and the broader Middle East had long feared that such a war was coming, even before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that began the war in Gaza. Hezbollah began firing on northern Israel shortly afterward in solidarity with Hamas, an ally.

Over the past three weeks, Israel has stepped up attacks on Hezbollah, detonating pagers and walkie-talkies owned by its members, dropping bunker-busting bombs on Lebanese sites where the group’s leaders were thought to be meeting and assassinating Mr. Nasrallah and other Hezbollah commanders.