Beirut (Lebanon) (AFP) - Hezbollah announced Saturday its chief Hassan Nasrallah has been killed, dealing a seismic blow to the Iran-backed group and prompting region-wide condemnation and reprisal threats against Israel.

Hezbollah’s statement came after the Israeli military said it had killed Nasrallah in an air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs Friday, a move that could further destabilise Lebanon and the wider Middle East after nearly a year of war in Gaza.

“Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah… has joined his great, immortal martyr comrades whom he led for about 30 years,” Hezbollah said in a statement.

Israel carried out more attacks on Lebanon into Saturday, with a Lebanese security source saying a strike targeted a warehouse near Beirut airport. The Israeli military has warned it will foil arms shipments through the airport.

Iran, which arms and finances Hezbollah, said a senior member of its Revolutionary Guards Corps was killed in the same strike. A source close to Hezbollah said the group’s top commander in south Lebanon, Ali Karake, had also died.

AFP journalists heard women weeping in the streets of Beirut as Hezbollah announced the news of Nasrallah’s death. “They are lying,” one woman shouted in disbelief.

But his death was hailed by some Israelis. “It should have been done a long time ago,” said David Shalev in Israel’s commercial hub Tel Aviv.

Rarely seen in public, Nasrallah had enjoyed cult status among his Shiite Muslim supporters, and was the only man in Lebanon with the power to wage war or make peace.

Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari, in a televised briefing, called Nasrallah “one of the greatest enemies of the State of Israel of all time” and added: “His elimination makes the world a safer place.”

In Tehran, posters of Nasrallah were put up bearing the slogan “Hezbollah is alive”.

First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref denounced the “unjust bloodshed” and threatened that Nasrallah’s killing will bring about Israel’s “destruction”.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared public mourning, as did Lebanon and Iraq.

The Lebanon violence has raised fears of a wider spillover of the nearly year-old Gaza war, with Iran-backed militants across the Middle East vowing to keep fighting Israel.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said he was “gravely concerned by the dramatic escalation of events in Beirut”.

Just a short while before the deadly Beirut strike, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Iran in his UN General Assembly speech saying: “If you strike us, we will strike you.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz called Nasrallah’s killing a “justified counter-terrorism” action, and US President Joe Biden – whose government is Israel’s top arms supplier – said it was a “measure of justice”.

- Mass displacement -

Hezbollah in Lebanon began low-intensity cross-border attacks a day after its Palestinian ally Hamas staged its unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, triggering war in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas on Saturday condemned Nasrallah’s killing as a “cowardly terrorist act”.

Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthi rebels, who have launched attacks in stated support of Hamas, said Nasrallah’s “martyrdom” would strengthen their determination to confront “the Israeli enemy”.

A rare missile launch from Yemen was intercepted by Israeli air defences on Saturday, the military said.

Hezbollah ally Syria condemned Israel’s “barbarism and wanton disregard for all international standards and laws”.

Israel has shifted the focus of its operation from Gaza to Lebanon, where heavy bombing has killed more than 700 people as cross-border exchanges escalated over the past week, according to health ministry figures.

Most of those Lebanese deaths came on Monday, the deadliest day of violence since Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war.

The UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi said “well over 200,000 people are displaced inside Lebanon” and more than 50,000 have fled to neighbouring Syria.

- ‘All-out war’ -

The Israeli military has said it hit more than 140 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon since Friday night, and continued to pound south Beirut into Saturday, sending panicked families fleeing.

An AFP photographer said dozens of buildings have been destroyed.

The blasts that rocked southern Beirut late Friday were the fiercest there since Israel and Hezbollah last went to war in 2006.

Middle East expert James Dorsey described Friday’s attack as “very sophisticated”, adding it “demonstrates… just how deeply Israel has penetrated Hezbollah”.

After Friday’s heavy strikes, Israel issued fresh warnings for people to leave part of the densely populated southern suburbs before dawn.

Hundreds of families spent the night outside.

“I didn’t even pack any clothes, I never thought we would leave like this and suddenly find ourselves on the streets,” south Beirut resident Rihab Naseef, 56, told AFP.

- Israel to ‘remove threat’ -

Israel’s military also announced strikes Saturday on the Bekaa valley in eastern Lebanon and on the south.

Hezbollah claimed a rocket attack on northern Israel, and later said it launched “a salvo of Fadi-3 rockets” towards the Ramat David airbase which it has targeted before.

Israel has raised the prospect of a ground operation against Hezbollah, prompting widespread international concern.

Netanyahu has vowed to keep fighting until the northern border with Lebanon is secured.

“Israel has every right to remove this threat and return our citizens to their homes safe,” he said.

Diplomats have said efforts to end the war in Gaza were key to halting the fighting in Lebanon and bringing the region back from the brink.

Fearing greater violence, the United States ordered diplomats’ families to leave Lebanon, following a similar move by Germany which has also reduced staffing at its missions in Israel, Lebanon and the occupied West Bank.

Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.

Of the 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,586 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.

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