Hezbollah spokesman killed in rare Israeli air strike on central Beirut

The main spokesman for Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group has been killed in the first Israeli air strike on central Beirut in more than a month, an official with the group said.

Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip had earlier killed 12 people, Palestinian medical officials said.

The Hezbollah official said Mohammed Afif was killed in the strike in central Beirut.

Mr Afif had been especially visible after Israel’s military escalation in September and following the assassination of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was also killed in an Israeli air strike.

Israeli warplanes had earlier pounded the southern suburbs of Beirut after the military warned people to evacuate from several buildings.

Ceasfire proposals

The Hezbollah militant group has a strong presence in the area, known as the Dahiyeh, and the strikes came as Lebanese officials are considering a US-brokered ceasefire proposal.

Also on Sunday, Israeli police said they arrested three suspects after flares were fired at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence in the coastal city of Caesarea.

Mr Netanyahu and his family were not at the residence when two flares were fired at it overnight, and there were no injuries, authorities said. A drone launched by Hezbollah struck the residence last month, also when Mr Netanyahu and his family were away.

The police did not provide details about the suspects behind the flares, but officials pointed to domestic political critics of Mr Netanyahu.

Israel’s largely ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, condemned the incident and warned against “an escalation of the violence in the public sphere”.

Mass protests

Mr Netanyahu has faced months of mass protests over his handling of the hostage crisis unleashed by Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which ignited the ongoing war in Gaza.

Critics blame Mr Netanyahu for the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to happen and for not reaching a deal with Hamas to release scores of hostages still held inside Gaza.

Israelis rallied again in the city of Tel Aviv on Saturday night to demand a ceasefire deal to return them.

Israeli strikes killed six people in Nuseirat and another four in Bureij, two built-up refugee camps in central Gaza.

Another two people were killed in a strike on Gaza’s main north-south highway, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah, which received all 12 bodies.

The war between Israel and Hamas began after Palestinian militants stormed into Israel in 2023, killing about 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and abducting 250 others. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, about a third of them believed to be dead.

The health ministry in Gaza says around 43,800 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but has said women and children make up more than half the fatalities.

Around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced, and large areas of the territory have been flattened by Israeli bombardment and ground operations.

The Israeli military posted evacuation warnings on X about an hour before the strikes on southern Beirut, which came early Sunday. Local media reported church bells ringing in and around the area to alert residents.

Baath party

The strike that killed Mr Afif hit a building in central Beirut belonging to the Arab socialist Baath party. It was the first strike in the central part of the city in weeks.

People could be seen fleeing the neighbourhood after the strike, which came without warning. There was no immediate comment on the strike from the Israeli military.

The Israeli military also renewed calls on Sunday for residents in more than a dozen villages in southern Lebanon to flee as ground troops pushed further north.

Hezbollah began firing rockets, missiles and drones into Israel the day after Hamas’s 2023 attack, drawing retaliatory air strikes. The conflict steadily escalated and erupted into all-out war in September. Israeli forces invaded Lebanon on October 1.

Hezbollah has continued to fire dozens of projectiles into Israel each day and has expanded their range to the central part of the country. A rocket barrage on the northern city of Haifa on Saturday damaged a synagogue and wounded two civilians.

More than 3,400 people have been killed in Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry, and more than 1.2 million driven from their homes. It is not known how many of the dead are Hezbollah fighters.

On the Israeli side, Hezbollah’s aerial attacks have killed at least 76 people, including 31 soldiers, and caused some 60,000 people to flee from communities in the north.

Israeli justice minister Yariv Levin seized on the flare attack on Mr Netanyahu’s home to call for a revival of his plans to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, which had sparked months of mass protests before the war.

“The time has come to provide full support for the restoration of the justice system and the law enforcement systems, and to put an end to anarchy, rampage, refusal, and attempts to harm the prime minister,” he said in a statement.

Supporters said the judiciary changes aim to strengthen democracy by circumscribing the authority of unelected judges and turning over more powers to elected officials. Opponents see the overhaul as a power grab by Mr Netanyahu.

Many Israelis believe the fierce internal divisions caused by the attempted overhaul had weakened the country and its military ahead of the Hamas assault.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid said in a post on X that he “strongly condemns” the firing of flares at Mr Netanyahu’s home while criticising Mr Levin’s proposal.

“Levin should go home with rest of this irresponsible government,” Mr Lapid wrote. “We will not let him turn Israel into an undemocratic state.”