A Hezbollah veteran and member of the group’s Jihad Council, Ibrahim Aqil, has been killed in an Israeli air strike at the Dahiya district of Beirut, the Israel Defense Force confirmed Friday.

The IDF acted “in a targeted manner and eliminated Aqil and other Hezbollah commanders,” its spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, told reporters. The commanders, including leaders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, “were those who devised plans to capture the Galilee, as Hamas did on October 7.” 

This week’s attacks involving thousands of exploding beepers and walkie talkies and Friday’s killing at Beirut are widely seen as an Israeli drive to widen the war on Hezbollah, which since October 8 has successfully managed to turn northern Israel into a no-man zone.  

Washington officials made clear America was not involved in this week’s waves of exploding communication devices, widely attributed to Israel. During meetings at Cairo and Paris, Secretary Blinken urged “all sides” to avoid escalation. Aware of such warning, Israel targeted a top Hezbollah official long sought by America. 

Aqil “has much blood on his hands,” including that of Americans, Admiral Hagari said. The Department of State has an outstanding reward of up to $7 million for information on Aqil, also known as Tahsin, who “serves on Hezbollah’s highest military body and was principal member of Islamic Jihad Organization, which claimed the bombing of of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in April 1983 that killed 63 people.”

Aqil reportedly was about to assume a top spot in Hezbollah, becoming its leading military commander and no. 2 to the organization’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah. The veteran Nasrallah confidante became candidate for the spot after Fuad Shukr was killed by Israel this summer. 

AFP was first to confirm Aqil’s death on Friday after images of a destroyed building at southern Beirut flooded social media. Israeli news outlets were quick to report that Aqil was targeted by Israeli jets that bombed the Dahiya building.  

“The target of the attack was Ibrahim Aqil, a member of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council and a holder of the position equivalent to the head of the operations division,” the northern Israel-based Alma research center writes. “Among other things, the Radwan unit is subordinate to him.”

Radwan is the elite, southern Lebanon-based Hezbollah force that has been at the forefront of the attacks on the Galilee since October 8. It is also reported to have long prepared an invasion of northern Israel, including by digging tunnels into Israeli territory from Lebanon.

The targeted bombing at the Dahiya, a Hezbollah stronghold, occurred one day after Mr. Nasrallah made a much-anticipated speech following this week’s two-day maiming and deaths of thousands of the terrorist organization’s members, whose communication devices exploded simultaneously in two separate attacks.

In the Thursday speech, Mr. Nasrallah acknowledged that Hezbollah has suffered its most significant blow ever, and vowed retaliation. Despite similar threats after the Shukr killing, Hezbollah maintained its previous routine of daily rocket barrages targeting Israel’s north, though in recent days it widened the scope. 

On Friday, the IDF posted a picture of its chief of staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, and top military aides who were consulting near the Lebanese border, indicating that something big was about to occur. 

Since October 8, Hezbollah has conducted a war of attrition that it has been careful not to widen, fearing Israel’s military superiority. “Unless the war with Lebanon stops, it will widen,” a former Mossad chief, Danny Yatom, told Kan News on Friday. “They try to exhaust us, we try to exhaust them, but now Israel is taking the initiative.”