TEL AVIV, Israel—The Israel Defense Forces killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike on the Iran-backed terrorist group’s Beirut headquarters, the IDF said on Saturday.
"Last night, in a precise strike on Hezbollah's terrorist headquarters in the neighborhood in Beirut, the IDF eliminated the leader of the Hezbollah terrorist organization, Hassan Nasrallah," IDF international spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani told reporters in a briefing. "I can now confirm this to you."
"Hassan Nasrallah will no longer be able to terrorize the world," the IDF said on X.
The Israeli airstrike on Friday also eliminated Ali Karaki, Hezbollah's Southern Front commander, and other leaders of the group, according to the IDF.
"The strike was conducted while Hezbollah's senior chain of command, what's left of it, were operating from the headquarters and advancing terrorist activities against the citizens of the State of Israel," Shoshani said.
Hezbollah confirmed the death of Nasrallah on Saturday.
Shoshani said the Hezbollah headquarters were located underground, beneath a residential building in Dahiyeh, a southern suburb of Beirut, in keeping with the group's strategy "to hide behind civilians." He said the IDF always takes precautions to avoid civilian deaths, but he was not prepared to speak to the specifics of Friday’s airstrike, including the types of munitions that were used or the extent of the collateral damage.
During Nasrallah's 32 years at the helm of Hezbollah, the group carried out numerous terror attacks in the Jewish state and around the world, killing Israelis, Americans, and others. Nasrallah also led Hezbollah into the Syrian civil war, backing the country's president, Bashar al Assad, in massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians. Israel, the United States, and the European Union have designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
"Nasrallah is one of the world's strongest, or was one of the world's strongest and most influential terrorists and one of the terrorists with the most capabilities in the world, and he was a real threat with the blood of thousands of people on his hands," Shoshani said, noting the Hezbollah leader had vowed to destroy Israel.
The IDF early on Saturday launched a fresh wave of airstrikes on Dahiyeh and other parts of Lebanon, continuing an offensive that has taken out much of Hezbollah's leadership and weapons arsenal since Israel turned its attention northward from the war in Gaza last week.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently approved Friday’s airstrike, which shook the Lebanese capital and sent up thick plumes of smoke over the city, shortly before his address to the U.N. General Assembly.
"As long as Hezbollah chooses the path of war, Israel has no choice, and Israel has every right to remove this threat and return our citizens to their homes safely. And that’s exactly what we’re doing," Netanyahu told the plenum as IDF fighter jets streaked toward Beirut.
Some 60,000 residents of Israel's Lebanon border region have been evacuated from their homes since Oct. 8, when Hezbollah began bombarding the north on a near-daily basis in solidarity with Hamas, the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group that carried out a massacre in southern Israel a day earlier and sparked the Gaza war. According to Israel, Hezbollah had ongoing plans to conduct an Oct. 7-style attack of its own.
The Biden administration, which failed to impose a ceasefire on Israel and Hezbollah on Thursday, distanced itself from the strike against Nasrallah.
"The United States was not involved in this operation, and we had no advanced warning," a Pentagon spokeswoman said on Friday.
Also on Friday, the IDF said it had deployed two reserve brigades to northern Israel amid preparations for a possible ground incursion into Lebanon.
IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said following the confirmation of Nasrallah's death: "The message is simple, to anyone who threatens the citizens of the State of Israel, we will know how to get to them."