Hezbollah’s media relations chief Mohammad Afif. Picture: Reuters
An Israeli strike on a building in a densely populated district of Beirut on Sunday killed Hezbollah’s media relations chief Mohammad Afif, two Lebanese security sources said, although there was no immediate confirmation from Hezbollah.
The Israeli military declined to comment. There was no evacuation order for the area published on the Israeli military spokesperson’s account on social media platform X before the strike.
The strike hit the Ras al-Nabaa neighbourhood where many people displaced from Beirut’s southern suburbs by the Israeli bombardment had been seeking refuge.
The security sources said it struck a building where the offices of the Ba’ath Party are located, and the head of the party in Lebanon, Ali Hijazi, told Lebanese broadcaster Al-Jadeed that Afif was in the building.
The broadcaster later also said Afif had been killed. It showed footage of a building whose upper floors had collapsed onto the first storey, with civil defence workers at the scene.
Afif was a long-time media adviser to Hezbollah’s former secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air attack on the southern suburbs of Beirut on September 27.
He managed Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station for several years before taking over the Iran-backed group’s media relations office.
Hezbollah and Israel have been trading fire for more than a year, since Hezbollah began launching rockets at Israeli military targets on October 8, 2023, a day after its Palestinian ally Hamas carried out a deadly attack on southern Israel. In late September, Israel dramatically escalated and expanded its military campaign in Lebanon, heavily bombing the country’s south, east and the southern suburbs of Beirut alongside ground incursions along the border.
Afif hosted several media conferences for journalists amid the rubble in the southern suburbs of the capital. In his most recent comments to reporters on November 11, he said Israeli troops had been unable to occupy any territory in Lebanon and Hezbollah had enough weapons and supplies to fight a “long war”. The Lebanese health ministry said the strike killed one and injured three.
Meanwhile, dozens of Palestinians were killed or injured in an Israeli strike on a multi-storey residential building in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya on Sunday, medics said. The Hamas-run Gaza government media office put the number of those killed at 72.
The Israeli army sent tanks into Beit Lahiya and the nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, the largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight historic refugee camps, last month in what it said was a campaign to fight Hamas militants waging attacks and prevent them from regrouping. It said it has killed hundreds of militants in those three areas.
A statement by the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, on Sunday said fighters blew up an Israeli army vehicle during fighting in Beit Lahiya. Earlier in the day, an Israeli air strike killed at least 10 people in the Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip, when a missile hit a house, medics said. Four other people were killed in the nearby Nuseirat camp, they added.
Cape Times
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