Israel airstrike wiped out slew of senior Hezbollah military leaders alongside top commander

A slew of senior leaders of Hezbollah’s elite fighting force were killed alongside top commander Ibrahim Aqil, in a rare airstrike Friday in Beirut as the longtime enemies inch closer to a full-blown war, military officials said.  The Israel Defense Forces said Saturday morning that the strike not only killed Aqil, the head of Hezbollah’s military operations and commander of its Radwan Force, but also eliminated 15 other senior commanders and members of the terror group who had gathered beneath a high rise apartment building in the Dahiya area of southern Beirut.The terror group acknowledged that along with Aqil, Friday’s attack killed senior commander Abu Wahbi, whom the IDF identified as the head of the Radwan Force’s training unit and its former commander.Along with Aqil, Wahbi had been plotting a murderous raid on communities of the Galilee region of northern Israel, reminiscent of Hamas’ bloody Oct.

7 attack, which sparked the ongoing war in Gaza, the IDF said.  Wahbi was involved in “advancing Hezbollah’s entrenchment in southern Lebanon, while attempting to improve the organization’s ground combat capabilities,” along with planning and executing numerous rocket fire and infiltration attacks on the Jewish state, according to the IDF.The Israeli military named a dozen Radwan Force senior commanders killed in the air strike, who had been leading and planning the group’s “attack and infiltration plan into Israeli territory for years, to be executed when given the order,” officials said. “Aqil and the commanders eliminated in the strike were responsible for planning, advancing, and executing hundreds of terrorist operations against Israel, including the planning of Hezbollah’s murderous scheme to raid the communities of the Galilee,” the IDF said.Friday’s strike, which left a total of 37 dead, including three children and seven women, according to the Lebanese health ministry, came on the heels of a pair of stunning, ...