The Israeli military said that its fighter jets “targeted and eliminated” Muhammad Hussein Srour and identified him as “the commander of Hezbollah’s air unit”. It was the fourth attack in a week targeting Iran-backed Hezbollah members.
According to reports, Srur, born in 1973, was among a number of top advisers sent by Hezbollah to Yemen to train the country’s Huthi rebels.
Israeli strikes on Hezbollah strongholds around Lebanon have killed more than 700 people this week and displaced about 1,18,000 people, raising fears of all-out war in the Middle East.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday rejected the 21-day truce proposal by the US, France, and other allies, and ordered his troops “to continue the fighting with full force”.
Netanyahu said that ensuring the safe return of Israelis to their homes was a priority.
“We will speak in actions, not words,” he wrote on X. “Let no one be confused: we will not stop hitting Hezbollah until we return our residents safely to their homes,” he said in another post.
A joint statement from US President Joe Biden, his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, leaders from Japan and key Gulf Arab powers — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab – said that the situation in Lebanon has become “intolerable” and “is in nobody’s interest, neither of the people of Israel nor of the people of Lebanon”.
Their appeal for the three-week ceasefire came hours after Israel’s military chief, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, told soldiers Wednesday to prepare for a possible ground offensive against Hezbollah.
Over 1,500 people have so far been killed since Israel and Hezbollah started fighting across the Lebanese border after the war in Gaza erupted when Hamas, a Hezbollah ally also backed by Iran, attacked Israeli towns on October 7 last year.
In 2006, the war between Hezbollah and Israel killed 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
