Hezbollah confirms Israel killed commander; Lebanon mourns strike victims

The Israeli military, in a statement Tuesday, called Shukr a senior military commander and held him responsible for a strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday that killed 12 children at a soccer field. Hezbollah denied carrying out that attack.

The location of Tuesday’s strike — less than three miles from central Beirut — and its timing, as tensions between Israel and Hezbollah are spiking, led to fears of more escalation and worry that Lebanon would be plunged into war. Israeli officials suggested that their killing of Shukr amounted to closing a circle: their answer to the soccer field attack.

But Hezbollah gave no such assurances. In its statement Wednesday, the group said leader Hasan Nasrallah would outline Hezbollah’s “political stance on this sinful attack and major crime” in a speech Thursday during Shukr’s funeral.

The Israeli strike killed at least five other people, including three women and two children — Hasan Fadallah, 10, and his sister Amira, 6, their aunt said — making it one of the deadliest single strikes for civilians in Lebanon during 10 months of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel. At least 80 people were injured, the Lebanese Red Cross said.

In a speech this month, Nasrallah vowed to retaliate for the killings of civilians by striking new areas in Israel.

During an emergency cabinet session Wednesday, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati condemned the Israeli strike on Shukr as well as the killing, hours later in Iran, of Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader.

“We wonder at the reason behind this escalation,” Mikati said in a statement carried by Lebanon’s state news agency. “We fear the situation will worsen if the countries concerned and the entire international community do not rush to curb this dangerous disorder.”

In Haret Hreik, an area where Hezbollah enjoys significant support, security was stepped up Wednesday as the rescue workers searched the detritus of the eight-story building that was hit, causing several floors to buckle. The area, which is predominantly Shiite Muslim but also has Christian residents, was rebuilt by Hezbollah, with funds from Iran, after the last major war between the group and Israel, in 2006.

A few blocks away from the destroyed building Wednesday, hundreds attended a funeral for the Fadallah children, who were to be buried in a cemetery normally reserved for Hezbollah fighters.

The children’s aunt, Zainab Sultani, said Israel and the United States were “responsible for what happened.” She had learned that the children were in peril from the family WhatsApp group, when her sister asked for help digging them out of the rubble. The children’s father, Mohamad, and their elder brother, Ali, were still hospitalized.

When the elder brother and her own son grow up, she said, they “will join the resistance and take revenge” for the siblings.

Fears of a wider war echoed in the neighborhood. Mariam Hasan, 48, an emergency room doctor at the local Sahel Hospital, said the staff was continually preparing for mass-casualty events. “Every six months we carry out training maneuvers to be prepared for natural disasters and terrorist attacks and wars,” she said

The night of the attack on Shukr, she was headed home but turned back to the hospital once she heard the blast. “Our hospital is ready for a war,” she said, but she added that she wanted a different future. “We have enough disease, poverty and misery; we do not need wars.”

Mohamad Ezzedine, a retired banker who lives next to the building where Shukr was killed, said his windows were shattered in the blast, but he had been through worse. His previous house was destroyed during the 2006 war. Now he worried about what was to come.

“Everything is possible,” he said.

Dadouch and Fahim reported from Beirut.