Israel-Hamas War: Hezbollah Says a Commander Was Killed in a Strike in Lebanon

Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, and Israel have traded increasingly intense and deadly cross-border fire since the Israel-Hamas war began three months ago, eliciting Israeli warnings of a full-scale war. Six days ago, a strike in Beirut — attributed, like the one on Monday, to Israel — killed a top Hamas official who was a liaison to Hezbollah and to the two groups’ mutual patron, Iran.

The U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, is visiting leaders in the Middle East this week on a trip aimed at preventing the fighting from expanding along other fronts. He arrived in Tel Aviv on Monday night.

A Lebanese security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that Mr. al-Tawil was a commander in Hezbollah’s Radwan unit, which Israel says aims to infiltrate its northern border. The official said that Mr. al-Tawil had been killed in an Israeli strike in Khirbet Selm, a village in southern Lebanon that is about nine miles from the Israeli border.

The Israeli military did not directly comment on the attack. In a statement, it said that an Israeli fighter jet had carried out “a series of strikes,” hitting a Hezbollah military site, without giving further details.

Mr. al-Tawil’s role in Hezbollah was not immediately clear. But in an apparent effort to signal his seniority, Al Manar, a Hezbollah-owned Lebanese broadcaster, and media controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, posted images of him alongside various high-ranking Hezbollah officials including the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as with Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian general who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2020.

A day earlier, the Israeli military said that it had killed at least seven members of Hezbollah in strikes aimed at destroying the Radwan unit and that it was ready to attack more of Hezbollah’s positions. The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi, said that its forces were determined to keep pressure on Hezbollah and that if those efforts fell short, Israel was ready to fight “another war.”

“We will create a completely different reality, or we will get to another war,” he said on Sunday.

Hezbollah attacks damaged an Israeli military base on Saturday, one of the group’s biggest assaults against Israel in months of back-and-forth strikes across the border. The powerful Lebanese militia has pledged support for Hamas, and in recent days, it has stepped up assaults on Israel in response to the killing last week of Saleh al-Arouri a senior Hamas leader, outside of Beirut.

The rocket fire on the base, the Northern Air Control Unit on Mount Meron, left it with significant damage, according to accounts in the Israeli news media, but the facility is still operating “and has been reinforced with additional systems,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said on Sunday.

The clashes have added to concerns that the Israel-Hamas war could grow into a wider regional conflict, and have forced tens of thousands of people on each side of the Israel-Lebanon border to evacuate their communities. In solidarity with Hamas, the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen has attacked ships in the Red Sea and launched missiles at Israel. The United States has struck targets in Iraq, while Israel is presumed to have carried out targeted assassinations in Syria and Lebanon.

Israeli leaders have repeatedly declared in recent weeks that there are only two options for restoring calm in the conflict with Hezbollah: a diplomatic solution that would move the Radwan forces farther from the border, north of the Litani River; or, failing that, a major Israeli military offensive aimed at achieving the same goal.

Calm, they say, is a prerequisite for about 80,000 Israelis who have been evacuated from the area to be able to return to their homes. A similar number of Lebanese have fled their homes on the other side of the border.

“Hezbollah is dragging Lebanon into a totally unnecessary war,” Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, told reporters on Monday.

“We are now at a fork in the road,” he added. “Either Hezbollah backs off, hopefully as part of a diplomatic solution, or we will push it away.”

The Biden administration has been calling for an agreement that would move Hezbollah forces away from the border, but with little apparent progress. Although Israeli officials have said that time for a diplomatic deal is running out, analysts say that Israel is wary of significantly expanding the conflict with Hezbollah while the military is still engaged in intensive fighting in Gaza.

Mr. Blinken’s remarks were the strongest public statement yet that normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel — a move that could set up a political realignment of Middle East powers and result in a U.S.-Saudi mutual defense treaty — remained a possibility since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, which set off the ongoing fighting in the Gaza Strip.

Mr. Blinken also said that Prince Mohammed and other leaders with whom he had met in the region said they were willing to coordinate and work together “to help Gaza stabilize and recover, to chart a political path forward for the Palestinians and to work toward long-term peace, security and stability in the region as a whole.”

All the leaders, he added, were ready to “make the necessary commitments.”

Mr. Blinken and other aides of President Biden are seeking to revive discussions about normalizing relations with Israel, in the hopes that such a step might prod the Israelis to agree to work toward establishing a Palestinian state.

But the heavy death toll in Gaza, where health officials say more than 22,000 people have been killed in Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks, has inflamed anti-Israel sentiments in Saudi Arabia and other nations in the region. That will make it more difficult for Prince Mohammed to navigate a path to normalizing relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem, should he choose to try.

Additionally, some senior Israeli officials oppose the notion of a Palestinian state or greater rights for Palestinians — and many Israeli citizens agree with them, given the horror of the attacks in October.

Mr. Blinken met with Prince Mohammed for about 90 minutes at the prince’s luxury winter camp in the remote oasis of Al Ula, in the kingdom’s western desert. After speaking to reporters traveling with him on the tarmac at the Al Ula airport, Mr. Blinken flew to Tel Aviv, where he plans to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials on Tuesday.

Before landing in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Blinken had talks in Abu Dhabi with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, to discuss the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the need to prevent the Israel-Gaza war from spreading across the region, a State Department spokesman said.

Mr. Blinken emphasized the “continued U.S. commitment to securing lasting regional peace that ensures Israel’s security and advances the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” the spokesman, Matthew Miller, said in a statement.

The Biden administration has insisted that Israel help forge a realistic path to a Palestinian state, arguing that Israel’s yearslong security policy on the Palestinians appears to have failed, as seen by the scale of the Oct. 7 attacks. Establishing a Palestinian state is a longstanding policy goal of the United States, but efforts toward achieving it had ebbed since the Obama administration.

Mr. Blinken and Sheikh Mohammed also spoke about the civil war in Sudan and “preventing further widespread civilian harm” there, Mr. Miller said.

The New York Times reported in September that the Emirates had been sending weapons to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group that is battling the regular army in Sudan, bringing the arms into the country through a remote military air base across the border in Chad. Mr. Blinken said in December that the two warring armies and associated militias in Sudan were all committing war crimes.

The Emirates is one of the biggest buyers of American arms and is viewed by the U.S. government as a security partner, but the country and the Biden administration are at odds over several major security issues, including the Emirates’ role in the Sudan war and its efforts to forge important military and economic partnerships with China.

Soon after landing in Saudi Arabia on Monday afternoon, Mr. Blinken met briefly in the Al Ula airport lounge with Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, to “discuss efforts to prevent the conflict from spreading and secure a lasting peace for the region,” Mr. Miller said. Mr. Borrell was leaving Al Ula after meeting with Prince Mohammed.

Mr. Blinken landed in Turkey on Friday for the start of a weeklong trip across the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

— Edward Wong Reporting from Al Ula, Saudi Arabia, and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, while traveling with the U.S. secretary of state

“The war shifted a stage,” Admiral Hagari told The New York Times in an interview. “But the transition will be with no ceremony,” he added. “It’s not about dramatic announcements.”

His comments came hours before Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, arrived in Israel on Monday night as part of a multistop tour of the Middle East aimed at preventing the Gaza conflict from escalating into a broader regional war.

Admiral Hagari also spoke days before the International Court of Justice in The Hague was expected to begin hearing a case brought by South Africa that accuses Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians. Gaza’s health ministry says that more than 20,000 people — about 1 percent of the population — have been killed since Oct. 7, when Israel began attacking the territory in retaliation for the Hamas terrorist attacks on southern Israel.

But it was far from clear that the new phase of Israel’s offensive would be less dangerous for Gazan civilians. Gazan health officials are still reporting scores of deaths every day in airstrikes, and some of the territory’s main hospitals have stopped working as Israeli forces surround them, accusing Hamas of using the medical facilities to hide military infrastructure.

Admiral Hagari said that Israel would continue to reduce the number of troops in Gaza, a process that began this month. As Israeli officials indicate that they have degraded Hamas’s military capabilities in northern Gaza, Admiral Hagari said the intensity of operations in the north Gaza had already started to ebb as the military shifts toward conducting more targeted raids there instead of wide-scale maneuvers.

He said that Israel would now focus on the group’s southern and central strongholds, particularly around the cities of Khan Younis and Deir al Balah.

He said Israel was also aiming to allow more humanitarian aid, including tents to house displaced people, into Gaza. The United Nations says that, as of the end of December, nearly 85 percent of Gazans, or some 1.9 million people, had been forced from their homes amid Israel’s airstrikes and ground campaign.

Admiral Hagari denied that Israel was committing genocide, saying that Israel took every precaution to avoid civilian deaths and was trying to increase aid delivery to Gaza.

The admiral said that Hamas had endangered civilians by embedding its military infrastructure within civilian areas. He added that the court should instead focus on how the war started on Oct. 7, when a Hamas-led raid on Israel killed roughly 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, prompting Israel to respond with airstrikes and an invasion.

“We were the ones who were butchered,” Admiral Hagari said.

The challenges facing Al-Aqsa grew on Monday with strikes in central Gaza that the Gazan health ministry said had killed dozens of people and injured scores more, all of whom would have been brought to the hospital. On Sunday, the ministry said that Israeli drones were “firing extensively” at the hospital, causing patients and staff to flee.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the reports. Israel has said that the militant group Hamas, which it aims to eliminate in Gaza, uses hospitals and other civilian facilities to hide fighters and weapons.

In a video of the W.H.O. visit on Sunday, Sean Casey, the agency’s emergency medical team coordinator, said, “There are patients coming in every few minutes,” adding: “It’s really a chaotic scene.” He said that the hospital was operating with 30 percent of the staff it had just a few days earlier and that hundreds of injured people were arriving for treatment every day.

Anas Azara, a nurse in the emergency department at Al-Aqsa, said in an interview on Monday that the hospital had been surrounded by Israeli tanks as the military advanced further into the area. Most staff members and displaced people who were sheltering there had evacuated over the last four days, he said.

He added that the Israeli military had not ordered the evacuation of the hospital, and that an Israeli drone shot directly at its entrance on Sunday. It was not possible to independently verify his account.

Al-Aqsa Hospital is one of only 13 hospitals that are still partially functioning in Gaza, according to the United Nations, and is facing a severe lack of medical equipment, according to staff members and health officials. Still, it is the only hospital taking in the mounting casualties amid an escalation of Israel’s offensive in central Gaza.

Two humanitarian groups, Medical Aid for Palestinians and the International Rescue Committee, said in a joint statement on Monday that their medical teams had ceased their work at the hospital as a result of the increasing Israeli military activity.

Those who have remained at the hospital were in a “state of panic and extreme fear,” Mr. Azara said. “The sound of shooting from drones and tanks is very close by,” he said. He added that some displaced families who remained at the hospital were preparing to flee to Rafah, an already overcrowded area in southern Gaza near the border with Egypt.

Mr. Azara said that he was among three nurses and two doctors still working in the hospital’s emergency department on Monday. Another doctor and nurse were working in the operation rooms, he said.

“The current situation could cause the hospital to cease its operations, which will lead to very catastrophic consequences,” Mr. Azara said. “Dead bodies will pile up in the streets.”

Nader Ibrahim contributed reporting.

While Mr. Barak, 87, is an internationally respected legal authority, he has also been at the center of a deeply polarizing domestic legal furor over the past year. He was vocal in his opposition to the right-wing government’s judicial overhaul plan, which is aimed at curbing the powers of the court. Mr. Barak, who had long been a symbol of judicial overreach for those who wanted to rein in the court, encouraged the nationwide protests against the plan.

Simcha Rothman, a right-wing Israeli legislator and a driving force behind the judicial overhaul efforts, responded curtly to the appointment in a social media post with the words: “My resounding silence.”

The International Court of Justice in The Hague, the highest legal body of the United Nations, hears disputes between states. To hear the Gaza case, which was brought by South Africa, its regular 15-judge panel will be expanded to 17, with one additional judge appointed by each side.

Both South Africa and Israel signed the 1948 Genocide Convention, and South Africa is accusing Israel of violating that agreement. South Africa accused Israel last month of trying to “destroy Palestinians in Gaza” as it pummels the enclave in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel led by Hamas.

The Israeli government has rejected South Africa’s allegations as a “blood libel” lacking any factual or legal basis, and has described the case as a “despicable and contemptuous exploitation” of the court.

The first hearings are scheduled to take place on Thursday and Friday. As an emergency measure, South Africa is asking for an immediate halt to the Israeli offensive. But final rulings by the court can take years.

Mr. Barak’s appointment to hear a case about genocide has a particular resonance because he is a Holocaust survivor. Born in 1936 in Lithuania, he was as a boy smuggled in a sack out of the ghetto in his Nazi-occupied hometown, Kovno, which is now called Kaunas. He emigrated with his parents to Palestine in 1947, the year before the founding of Israel.

After serving as Israel’s attorney general and a negotiator in the 1978 Camp David peace talks with Egypt, Mr. Barak was appointed to Israel’s Supreme Court and went on to serve as its president until his retirement in 2006.

Many of his legal decisions, particularly those pertaining to terrorism and security, were widely considered groundbreaking, according to analysts, and crucial to the international prestige afforded to Israel’s top court. One example was a ruling he led as chief justice in 1999 which banned most uses of torture by the security services to obtain information from suspected terrorists.

Amichai Cohen, a law professor and head of a program on national security and law at the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research group, said the appointment of Mr. Barak was notable for two reasons.

“First of all, the appointment shows that Israel is taking the process seriously and doing what it can to succeed in it and not fail,” he said.

“The second point is the man, of course,” Professor Cohen added.

Mr. Barak’s vilification by right-wing supporters of the government’s judicial overhaul plan only strengthens his status and credibility as a judge who will rule objectively, based on the law, Professor Cohen said.

“It shows that he is an independent figure who is not an emissary of the Israeli government,” he said.

The strike has been widely attributed to Israel, which did not confirm or deny responsibility. Israeli officials have contended that the Radwan unit is focused on attacking northern Israel and is a legitimate target.

Why does Israel call the Radwan unit a threat?

Radwan has taken the lead in Hezbollah’s long-running conflict with Israel, and in the cross-border attacks that have escalated in the three months that Israel and Hamas have been at war. Israeli military analysts say that Radwan has adopted the mission of conquering the northern Israeli region of Galilee.

Hezbollah and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip along Israel’s south, share a patron in Iran. If Iran and its proxies were to make a serious effort to broaden the war, the Israel-Lebanon border would be the likeliest place to do it. And since Hamas mounted its bloody Oct. 7 assault on Israel, there have been fears that Hezbollah could attempt something similar.

“The Radwan force is dedicated to duplicating what happened on Oct. 7 in the south of Israel in the north,” Tamir Hayman, a retired general who led Israeli military intelligence until 2021, said in an interview. “For that exact reason, it’s unacceptable for Israel to allow its fighters to remain in the border area.”

Last spring, the Radwan force took part in a rare example of public military exercises by Hezbollah, displaying an expansive military arsenal and simulating an infiltration into Israeli territory. Slick propaganda videos produced by Hezbollah have showcased the group’s small unit tactics and live-fire drills, interspersed with threats to Israel.

Why are we hearing more about the Radwan unit now?

The Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas also led to intensified strikes and retaliations between Hezbollah and Israel, forcing tens of thousands of people on each side of the border to evacuate.

In northern Israel, officials and residents have piled pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to protect them from Hezbollah and make it safe to return home.

“We need some kind of guarantee that there’s no danger to our citizens in the north,” General Hayman said.

What Israel had treated as a manageable threat it now describes as something more serious, and Israeli leaders have repeatedly cited the Radwan unit by name.

In December, Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s national security adviser, told Israeli media that the country “can no longer accept Radwan force sitting on the border.”

On Sunday, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israeli military, said that a “focus” of its actions in Lebanon was driving the Radwan force away from the border.

Israeli leaders have increasingly declared in recent weeks that there are only two options for restoring calm in the conflict: a diplomatic solution that would move the Radwan forces farther from the border, north of the Litani River, or a major Israeli military offensive aimed at achieving the same goal.

So far, U.S.-led efforts to secure a diplomatic solution have proved unsuccessful.

Where did the Radwan force come from?

The origins and makeup of the unit are murky.

The group took its name from the nom de guerre of its former leader, Imad Mughniyeh, who was assassinated in Syria in 2008. Under his command, the unit played a pivotal role in the abduction of Israeli soldiers in 2006 that led to the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War.

The unit, along with other elements of Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups, later took part in the battle against the Islamic State in Syria. But the fighting in the last three months has marked the Radwan force’s most active period against Israel since 2006.

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

In the northern half of the strip, where Israel began its ground invasion in late October, the military has “completed the dismantling of Hamas’s military framework,” Admiral Hagari said, though he added that the forces are still operating there against fighters who are continuing the battle even after their command structure has been destroyed.

He added that the fighting would continue throughout 2024.

Gabi Siboni, a colonel in the military reserves and a fellow of the conservative-leaning Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said that Hamas maintained infrastructure above and below ground in the north, “so it is still a fighting zone.” Despite the Israeli military’s achievements, Hamas is “a difficult and determined enemy” that has armed itself and “built underground fortresses” over years, he said.

“It will take time to dismantle it completely,” Mr. Siboni said, adding that the fighting in the south is all the more complicated by the density of the civilian population there, and that it might have to continue into 2025.

The Israeli military’s suggestion that fighting in Gaza would continue throughout the upcoming year further terrified Gazans who have already endured grievous losses in the first three months of the war — family, friends, neighbors, homes, jobs, schools and even, in a growing number of cases, the ability to feed themselves.

“We face great danger, as unarmed civilians who have nothing to do with the resistance or carrying weapons,” said Youssef, 32, a resident originally from Gaza City who has been displaced twice as he has attempted to flee the fighting.

While the Israeli military successfully ordered many Gazans in the north to evacuate further south in the earlier stages of the war — it is not known exactly how many — there is nowhere for people in central and southern Gaza to go, except to crowd further into the severely overstretched city of Rafah, at Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

More than a million people are already squeezed into Rafah’s confines, according to the United Nations. And people cannot move back north: Besides ongoing episodes of fighting in northern Gaza, that part of the territory is largely in ruins.

The United Nations estimated at the end of December that about 65,000 housing units across Gaza had been destroyed, and that nearly 300,000 more had been damaged, meaning more than half a million people will have no home to return to.

For those whose homes were still habitable, it said, many more would be unable to live in them right away because Gaza’s infrastructure was so degraded, and explosives left over from combat would make the return too risky.

In the meantime, Gaza’s displaced grapple with increasingly desperate shortages of food, water and warm clothing and shelter for the winter weather. About half of Gazans are at risk of starving, according to aid groups.

“There are children, and there’s no food or clothing, especially since it’s the winter,” said Youssef. “If we talk about suffering, I’ll need a lot of time to explain it.”

He added: “We have the right to return to our homes and see our children, and to have food, water, and drink, and to be safe.”

Delaying the negotiations, he said during a news conference Sunday night in Tel Aviv, “is killing the hostages.”

Mr. Lifshitz — whose grandmother, Yocheved Lifshitz, was among the handful of hostages released before a formal deal between Israel and Hamas was reached in November — said the family members met earlier in the week with Qatari officials, including Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani. He said that Qatari officials emphasized that a cease-fire would advance negotiations for a deal to release the rest of those still in captivity.

Noam Peri, whose 80-year-old father, Haim, is also among the hostages, said that she felt the Qatari government was fully committed to the release of all the hostages, and she called on the Israeli war cabinet to make a deal its top priority.

“We all have only one picture of victory,” she said, “seeing the hostages at home.”

Hamas released 105 hostages as part of a weeklong cease-fire deal reached in November, during which Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees from its own prisons.

Although there have been indications of talks between the two sides, the prospect of another hostage deal is still uncertain. Some analysts said the killing of a top Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, in Lebanon last week was likely to disrupt any negotiations.

Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon, vowed retaliation for Mr. al-Arouri’s killing — which U.S. officials said was carried out by Israel, although Israeli officials have not claimed responsibility — but said it would not necessarily affect the course of negotiations. “This movement has given many martyrs in the past,” he said.

Ruby Chen, an American citizen whose son Itay was taken hostage, said that both the family members and the Qataris pushed to coordinate the meeting. For the Qataris, the goal was to listen to the families of the hostages, Mr. Chen said. The families, for their part, wanted to establish an ongoing line of communication to help advance negotiations.

The fact that the Qataris met the families over the weekend points to their commitment to the hostages’ release, Mr. Chen said. He added that the Qataris told them that they saw the release of the hostages as a key to regional stability.

The families were worried that time was running out, Mr. Chen said, adding, “We’ll go anyplace, anywhere to find a way to get our loved ones back.”

Many of the remaining hostages are Israeli soldiers, and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s minister of defense, told their families on Sunday that military activities in Gaza would not end until all of the hostages are returned home.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed that at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting.

“The war must not be stopped until we achieve all of its goals — eliminating Hamas, returning all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will never again constitute a threat to Israel,” he said.