(NewsNation) — Israel announced Friday it killed a senior Hezbollah military official during a strike launched in a densely populated southern Beirut neighborhood.
That official, Ibrahim Akil, was a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. Hezbollah did not immediately confirm Israel’s claim of Akil’s killing but did say at least 12 people were killed and 66 others wounded.
Friday’s airstrike was apparently the deadliest such attack on a neighborhood of Beirut since 2006. Israel struck during rush hour as people were leaving work and children heading home from school, The Associated Press reported. Hours earlier, Hezbollah, according to the Israeli government, fired 140 rockets toward the northern part of the country.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously vowed retaliation for the mass bombing attack on pagers and walkie-talkies that Israel is widely believed to have been behind. At least 37 people were killed, including two children, and 3,000 wounded in Tuesday and Wednesday’s explosions.
Who was Ibrahim Akil?
Akil, who has used the aliases “Tahsin” and “Abdelqader,” died two months after an Israeli strike in the same area killed another senior member of Hezbollah, Fuad Shukr, in July.
Reuters writes he was born in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley sometime around 1960. Before becoming a founding member of Hezbollah, Akil had joined the other big Lebanese Shiite political movement, Amal, Reuters said.
The Radwan Force and Jihad Council, which Akil was the head of, is Hezbollah’s highest military body, according to the AP. In the 1980s, Akil was a principal member of Hezbollah’s terrorist cell, the Islamic Jihad Organization, which the U.S. said was responsible for bombing the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983. This attack killed 63 people. Another attack on the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in October 1983 killed 241 U.S. personnel.
Nasrallah, though, said in a 2022 interview with an Arabic broadcaster that these assaults were carried out by small groups not linked to Hezbollah.
The State Department said in addition to these acts, Akil also directed the kidnapping of American and German hostages in Lebanon and held them there.
Akil was named by the U.S. Treasury Department as a Specially Designated National in 2015. The State Department then designated Akil as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist pursuant to Executive Order 13224 in 2019. Before that, the Treasury had named Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization on Oct. 8, 1997.
In April 2023, the agency said it would give up to $7 million for information leading to Akil’s location and arrest.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.