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A senior Hezbollah commander was killed in Lebanon in what the group said was the second recent assassination by Israel of a militant leader there, as Israel showed it is willing to target Iran-backed forces across the border while avoiding an all-out war.
Hezbollah said the commander, Wissam Hassan Al-Tawil, was killed on Monday in an Israeli attack in a village in southern Lebanon.
The Israeli military said jet fighters struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon after a missile was launched toward northern Israel, but Israel didn’t say if Tawil’s death was related to the airstrikes or if the commander had been targeted.
Tawil was a member of Hezbollah’s governing Shura Council and was related by marriage to the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. But his killing falls short of triggering a second front for Israel during its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, analysts said.
The killing of someone as senior as Tawil sends a message to Hezbollah’s leadership that it is vulnerable, and serves as a warning against escalated provocation, said Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at SOAS University of London.
“Hezbollah remains able to absorb Israeli strikes of this kind without heading to escalation,” said Khatib. “Israel knows this and is pushing Hezbollah as far as it can, with both remaining within their implicitly agreed rules of engagement.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting soldiers just over the border from Lebanon on Monday, said the military would “do everything to restore security” in the area. “We prefer that this be done without a wide-ranging campaign, but that will not stop us,” he said.
Tawil’s death follows the killing last week of Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas official and a linchpin of the group’s relations with Iran, in a suspected Israeli airstrike on a Hezbollah stronghold of Beirut.
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