Reuters: It was not the Hezbollah leader who was killed, but his nephew

His death, if confirmed by Hezbollah, would be another major blow to the armed group and to Tehran, as it is one of Iran's main allies in the Middle East.

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Detail from Beirut after the Israeli attack, Photo: Reuters
Detail from Beirut after the Israeli attack, Photo: Reuters
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Reuters news agency reported that the commander of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, was not killed, but that his nephew was killed in an Israeli bombing.

"The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) targeted Beirut and eliminated Ali Yousef Harshi, the personal secretary and nephew of Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem," the IDF said, as reported by Reuters.

Reuters previously reported that Naim Qassem, the leader of the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

By attacking Israel on March 2, Hezbollah entered the war in the region on the side of Iran, two days after the United States and Israel began airstrikes on Iran.

Hezbollah attacked Israel after Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the war. Israel said it would respond forcefully and has since carried out airstrikes that have killed more than a thousand people.

Israel has already weakened the group's military capabilities and hit it hard with a series of assassinations since the start of the Gaza war on October 7, 2023.

Despite a 2024 U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon after more than a year of fighting, Israel has regularly carried out strikes on what it says are Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, accusing the group of trying to rearm.

Hezbollah has refused to disarm under a US proposal aimed at extending the ceasefire. Qassem directly threatened Israel, saying that rockets would fall on it if it restarted a full-scale war against Lebanon, Reuters reports.

In 2024, Israel killed Qassem's predecessor, veteran leader Hassan Nasrallah, in an airstrike on a Beirut suburb, the culmination of a conflict that began when Hezbollah opened fire on Israeli positions on the border in support of the Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas.

Hezbollah appointed Qassem, who had been a senior official in the group for more than 30 years, as its new leader a month after Nasrallah's assassination.

The group was founded in 1982 by Muslim Shiite fighters in Lebanon, with the support of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, with the aim of fighting against the then Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

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