A senior Hezbollah commander has been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon.
Mohammed Qassem Al-Shaer, a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, was killed in a strike on the village of Qaraoun in the western Beqaa district on Tuesday, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The IDF said Al-Shaer had “advanced numerous terrorist activities against the state of Israel” and his “elimination” would impair the Iran-backed militant group’s ability to launch attacks against Israel from southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah confirmed Al-Shaer had been killed and said it responded to his killing by launching “dozens” of Katyusha rockets and several drones toward two locations in northern Israel.
The IDF said those attacks caused no casualties, with some of the “projectiles” being intercepted and others falling in an open area.
The Israeli military added that it had responded by striking Hezbollah launchers “in the areas of Mansouri and At Tiri,” which had been used in the attacks.
Earlier Tuesday, the Israeli Air Force said it had struck a Hezbollah military structure in the village of Rachaf in the Nabatieh governorate of southern Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Public Health Emergency Operations Center said the strike on Rachaf wounded 12 people.
This comes weeks after Israel said it had killed Hezbollah’s most senior military official, Fu’ad Shukr, in a drone strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a populous neighborhood that is also the Iran-backed group’s stronghold.
Shukr was the most high-ranking Hezbollah official to have been assassinated since 2016, when Mustafa Badreddine, the group’s top commander at the time, was killed in Syria.
The hostilities in July raised the specter of a regional conflagration, prompting intense diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions.
There have been almost daily exchanges of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since war broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza on October 7.