Saleh al-Aruri, the deputy leader of the Hamas movement, was killed by an Israeli strike on Tuesday in a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, two security officials told AFP.
Later, Hamas verified Aruri’s demise, which Lebanese official media claimed was caused by an Israeli drone strike that claimed six lives in all.
The attack signaled a turn in the nearly three-month-long conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. One of Hamas’s chief military strategists, Aruri, was murdered in the movement’s first attack on the Lebanese capital since hostilities started. He was the movement’s first senior figure to be killed in combat.
Hezbollah and Israeli forces have been engaged in frequent cross-border gunfire across Lebanon’s southern border.
The Israeli military responded, “Does not comment on foreign media reports,” when asked about the Beirut strike.
According to AFP, a senior security official in Lebanon confirmed that Aruri and his bodyguards were slain.
The same information was confirmed by another security official, who also mentioned that one automobile and two levels of the targeted building had been damaged.
Hamas later confirmed the death on its official TV channel, saying Aruri was killed in a “treacherous Zionist strike”.
The movement’s media said the strike killed two other members of its armed wing.
‘Drone’
Samir Fandi, another Hamas senior, was one of the deceased, a Lebanese security official informed AFP.
According to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), “a hostile Israeli drone targeted a Hamas office in Al-Musharrafiya,” in the southern suburbs of Beirut, where Palestinian factions were meeting.
Two stories of the building on a popular thoroughfare were ripped out in a blast that sprayed debris into nearby cars and buildings up to approximately 100 meters (yards), according to an AFP photographer.
The street was crowded with spectators, and emergency lights flashed blue and red.
Israel accuses Aruri of planning multiple assaults.
Before being formally designated as the organization’s number two, he was chosen in 2017 to serve as Ismail Haniyeh’s deputy within Hamas.
In 2010, Aruri was released from Israeli prisons after serving nearly 20 years, provided he went into exile.
Izzat al-Rishq, a senior Hamas leader, stated in a statement that Aruri’s death “proves once again the utter failure” of Israel’s intentions in Gaza and will not “undermine the continued brave resistance.”
In response to Aruri “and his comrades'” “assassination,” Islamic Jihad, another armed group fighting with Hamas in Gaza, responded in a similar manner.
The organization claimed in a statement that the killings are an attempt to “drag the entire region into war, to escape from its failure in the political deadlock which the entire government is experiencing and the military field in which it has failed in the Gaza Strip.”
According to a statement from his office, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati denounced the murder, saying it “aims to draw Lebanon” more into the Israel-Hamas conflict.