Live Updates: Israel Keeps Up Strikes Against Hezbollah in Lebanon

The Israeli military on Sunday said it had struck dozens of targets in Lebanon, including rocket launchers and buildings that it said were used for storing weapons. On Saturday, airstrikes battered areas near Beirut, with Lebanon’s health ministry saying that 33 people had been killed and 195 wounded in the bombardment.

Hezbollah also confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, had been killed in an Israeli bombing on Friday. The assassination, which Israel said hit the militia’s underground headquarters, was a stunning escalation between Israel and Hezbollah, which have traded fire for nearly a year.

Mr. Nasrallah was a crucial figure among anti-Israel forces across the Middle East and beyond, and his death is a major blow to Hezbollah. His death deprives the organization of his long experience, personal relationships with other militia leaders and the unifying force of his rhetoric and personality.

Both Hezbollah and Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, on Saturday vowed to continue fighting. The Israeli military said that it had killed a senior member of the group’s intelligence apparatus, Hassan Khalil Yassin.

Here’s what else to know:

• Israeli prime minister: Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement on Saturday that he had ordered the assassination of Mr. Nasrallah because the Hezbollah leader would have managed to rebuild the militant group’s capabilities, no matter how battered. But he said that “the work was still incomplete.”

• Heavy bombs: A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Mr. Nasrallah on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.

• Internally displaced: Israel’s airstrikes have contributed to a deepening sense of dread in Lebanon, where about half a million people have been displaced by the escalating conflict, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Thousands camped on the streets and beaches of Beirut, where Mr. Nasrallah’s death was met with grief and shock by some.

• Iran’s response: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, mourned Mr. Nasrallah’s death and called on all Muslims to rise against Israel. But he did not pledge retaliation or revenge.

Farnaz Fassihi and Edward Wong contributed reporting.

Iran had for 40 years nurtured Hezbollah as the main arm of its proxy network of militias, as a forward defense against Israel. But in the past two weeks, Hezbollah’s capacity began to crumble under wave after wave of Israeli attacks on its leadership, arsenal and communications.

Now, fissures have opened within the Iranian government over how to respond to Mr. Nasrallah’s killing, with conservatives arguing for a forceful response and the moderates, led by Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, calling for restraint.

All of this has left Iran, and its supreme leader, in a vulnerable position.

Four Iranian officials who knew Mr. Nasrallah personally and had been briefed on events said that Mr. Khamenei had been deeply shaken by his friend’s death and was in mourning, but had assumed a calm and pragmatic posture. The officials, including two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Mr. Khamenei struck much the same tone in public. Instead of lashing out at Israel, he issued two restrained statements, praising Mr. Nasrallah as a leading figure in the Muslim world and the so-called axis of resistance, and saying that Iran would stand by Hezbollah.

Significantly, Mr. Khamenei signaled that it would be Hezbollah, not Iran, that would be leading any response to Israel, and that Iran would play a supporting role. “All of the forces in the resistance stand by Hezbollah,” Mr. Khamenei said. “It will be Hezbollah, at the helm of the resistance forces, that will determine the fate of the region.”

It was a striking sign, some analysts said, that Mr. Khamenei may have no way to effectively respond at the moment to Israel’s onslaught on his proxies. Faced with a choice between all-out war with Israel or lying low in the interest of self-preservation, he appears to be choosing the latter.

“They are completely checkmated by Israel at this moment,” said Sanam Vakil, the director for Middle East at Chatham House. “Khamenei’s statement is indicative of the gravity of the moment and the caution; he is not publicly committing to anything that he can’t deliver.”

After Mr. Khamenei’s statements, a flurry of reactions from senior Iranian officials and military commanders had the same cautious tone, outsourcing revenge to other militia groups in the region. Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards, said that it would be “Hezbollah, Hamas and other Palestinian militants” that would deliver blows to Israel.

In Tehran, the news of Mr. Nasrallah’s death cast a pall of shock and anxiety over senior officials who wondered in private phone calls and during emergency meetings if Israel would strike Iran next, and if Mr. Khamenei would be its next target, the four Iranian officials said in telephone interviews.

“This was an incredibly heavy blow, and realistically speaking, we have no clear path for recovering from this loss,” Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former vice president of Iran, said in an interview from Tehran on Saturday. “We will not go to war, that’s off the table. But Iran will also not reverse course in supporting the militant groups in the region, nor in defusing tensions with the West. All of these things can be pursued at the same time.”

Mr. Abtahi said the collective feeling among Iranian officials was one of “shock, anger, sadness and a lot of anxiety.”

This was far different from the sentiment after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, when Iran and its other proxies celebrated the surprise incursion. At that time, Hezbollah almost immediately attacked Israel’s north with rockets and continued exchanging fire. Iran gradually activated its network of militant groups known collectively as the “axis of resistance” to open fronts against Israel and create chaos in the region to pressure both the United States and Israel into a cease-fire with Hamas.

For Iran, the gamble was to keep the pressure percolating without setting off an all-out regional war.

In many ways, the yearlong confrontation between Iran and its proxies and Israel came to a violent head when Mr. Nasrallah was killed. Iran’s effort to weaken Israel through its proxies has appeared to backfire, leading to a catastrophic blow against its most strategic ally.

When the news broke that Israel had most likely killed Mr. Nasrallah, Mr. Khamenei convened an emergency meeting of the Supreme National Security Council at his home, the Iranian officials said. During the meeting, people were divided on how to respond.

Conservative members, including Saeed Jalili, an influential former presidential candidate, argued that Iran needed to quickly establish deterrence with a strike on Israel, before Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, brought the war to Tehran, according to officials familiar with the meeting.

Iran’s new president, Mr. Pezeshkian, who spent last week telling world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly that his government wanted to defuse tensions and get along with the West, argued against such a response, saying that Iran should not fall into a trap being set by Mr. Netanyahu for a wider war, the Iranian officials said.

Other moderate voices on the council argued that Mr. Netanyahu had blown through all red lines, and that if it launched attacks on Israel, Iran could face dire attacks on its own critical infrastructure, something the country could not afford, those officials said, particularly given the dire state of the economy.

But state television, run by Mr. Jalili’s affiliates, called for Iran to strike Israel, in open defiance of Mr. Khamenei’s caution. “There is no difference between Tehran and Baghdad and Beirut, the regime will come after each of these targets,” the anchor of state television said. “Netanyahu only understands one language, and that’s ballistic missiles and drones.”

Domestically, Iran has faced a cascade of challenges, from public discontent against government corruption and mismanagement of the economy and widespread hardship to Israel’s infiltration into Iran’s military and political ranks.

In New York, Mr. Pezeshkian told reporters that Iran was ready to “lay down its arms if Israel laid down its arms,” and called for an international force to intervene in establishing peace in the Middle East.

Mr. Pezeshkian has had to contend with two major crises during his two months in office: the Israeli assassination of the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on the night of his inauguration and Mr. Nasrallah’s killing on the eve of his birthday.

Those crises made him an easy target among conservatives in Iran who criticized his conciliatory message in New York, saying it showed weakness and emboldened Israel to kill Mr. Nasrallah. The conservatives argued Iran should deploy fighters to Lebanon, as it did for the Syrian government in its civil war, to help Hezbollah in the event of an all-out war with Israel.

“Israel has attacked the nucleus cell of the resistance and thus we cannot be indifferent,” said a conservative cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad Hassan Akhtari, the head of Iran’s Committee to Support Palestinians and the former head of international relations in Mr. Khamenei’s office.

Two members of the Revolutionary Guards — including a strategist who had been in planning meetings for the past two days on how Iran should respond — said in interviews that Iran’s immediate priority was to help Hezbollah get back on its feet, name a successor to Mr. Nasrallah, line up a new command structure and rebuild a safe communications network. Then, Hezbollah could plan its retaliation against Israel, they said.

Iran was planning to send a senior Quds Forces commander to Beirut by way of Syria to help guide Hezbollah’s recovery, the two Revolutionary Guards members said.

Mr. Khamenei announced five days of mourning in Iran, but across the country, the reaction to Mr. Nasrallah’s death was mixed. Supporters of the government staged public mourning ceremonies in Tehran’s Palestine Square. They waved the yellow flag of Hezbollah and chanted, “revenge, revenge,” and “death to Israel.”

But among dissidents, victims of the government’s brutal crackdowns and many ordinary Iranians, Mr. Nasrallah was viewed as an arm of the regime’s oppression. They rejoiced at his death, dancing in the streets and passing boxes of sweets at traffic stops in several cities, according to witnesses. Cars that passed by honked their horns in support.

Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force targeting specialist who also reviewed the video, agreed with the analysis. In text messages with The Times, he said the bombs were “exactly what I would expect” to be used in what Israel has said was an attack on Mr. Nasrallah in Hezbollah’s underground headquarters.

In May, the Biden administration announced it had paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of concerns over civilian safety in Gaza.

The video, published Saturday on the Israeli military’s official Telegram channel with the caption “Israeli Air Force Fighter Jets Involved in the Elimination of Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s Central Headquarters in Lebanon,” shows at least eight planes in a row armed with 2,000-pound bombs. Some are too far away to clearly identify the exact model, but the closer planes are seen armed with BLU-109 bombs. That model of bomb is also identifiable when the video shows two planes taking off, with one plane carrying six of those munitions. Then the video shows a plane returning at dusk to the Israeli air base without any bombs.

While the video does not show the planes dropping the bombs, Mr. Ball said that videos showing the explosions in the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut, as well as the damage caused, are consistent with the 2,000-pound bombs carried by the Israeli jets in the video. A New York Times analysis of verified videos, photos and satellite imagery showed that the attack destroyed at least four apartment buildings that were each at least seven stories tall.

Two senior Israeli defense officials told The Times that more than 80 bombs were dropped over a period of several minutes to kill Mr. Nasrallah, but did not confirm the type of munitions used. The Israeli military did not answer questions from The Times on the bombs seen in this video or used on the attack on Mr. Nasrallah. U.S. government officials referred questions on the munitions to the Israeli military.

Israel continued to pound Beirut’s southern suburbs on Saturday. Visual evidence analyzed by The Times shows at least 13 sites were struck on Friday and Saturday across at least three miles of densely developed city. The full extent of the strikes is unclear.

Lebanon’s health ministry said on Saturday that at least 33 people had been killed and more than 195 people injured by the strikes, and the toll is expected to rise with many still buried under rubble.

Mr. Nasrallah’s assassination was a stunning escalation of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in a conflict that has gone on for nearly a year. Hezbollah began firing into northern Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Hamas, which is also supported by Iran, and Israel frequently responded, intensifying its attacks dramatically over the last two weeks. That has fueled fears of an all-out regional war that could draw in bigger players like Iran.

Devon Lum, Aaron Boxerman, Eric Schmitt and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting. McKinnon de Kuyper contributed video editing.

Israel’s killing of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has created a sense of instability in Lebanon, where the group was both an armed force and a powerful, longstanding political entity. But the loss of Hezbollah’s longtime leader could create a path to regaining stability, said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Lebanon has been in a worsening political crisis since 2019, when Hezbollah and its allies survived protests over a deep economic crisis, and since the outrage over a huge 2020 port explosion, widely attributed to government negligence. Political dysfunction in the state reached its nadir two years ago, when Hezbollah and its allies lost their parliamentary majority but maintained enough clout to block major decisions.

Since 2022, Lebanon’s Parliament has been unable to name a president, and the country has been run by a caretaker prime minister with limited powers to lift the country out of its severe economic crisis and political disarray.

Some politicians, including both rivals and allies of Hezbollah, have proposed using this moment to call an emergency session of Parliament, name a president and try to restore some functionality to the state.

“A lot of Lebanese are saying, you know, tragic as it is, it shuffles the deck and probably gives more of an opening to do some long-needed domestic repairs,” Mr. Salem said. “A weakened, traumatized Hezbollah might even agree, because they’ll realize that they are going to need at least five years to recover.”

The wild card may be Hezbollah’s supporters among the country’s large Shiite Muslim community, tens of thousands of whom have been displaced by fierce Israeli bombardment across the south and east of the country, where Hezbollah holds sway. They have also borne the brunt of the death toll, which is already in the hundreds but expected to rise.

Lina Khatib, an associate fellow at the London-based research organization Chatham House, said a big question is how Hezbollah’s supporters react to the appearance of weakness in a force that long claimed to protect them.

“There is wide anger among Hezbollah’s constituents that is likely to spill out onto the streets of Beirut and may spark clashes with Hezbollah’s opponents,” she said. “It’s important for Lebanon’s political leaders to take measures to restore calm and project a degree of unity.”

Some political leaders have taken that approach with Lebanon’s Christians, whose sect customarily holds the presidential post. So has the former prime minister, Saad Hariri, a Sunni Muslim. He offered condolences over the killing of Mr. Nasrallah, even though Hezbollah has been accused of orchestrating the assassination of his father, who also served as prime minister.

Mr. Hariri called Mr. Nasrallah’s killing a “cowardly act condemned in its entirety by those of us who paid dearly with the lives of our loved ones, when assassination became an alternative to politics.”

“What is required now is for everyone to rise above differences and selfishness to bring our country to safety,” he wrote in a statement.

Lebanese officials have stressed that they do not want a conflict with Israel. “We’d like to live without war — happily, as a tourist country, a beautiful country, good food — and we are not able to do it,” the foreign minister, Abdallah BouHabib, told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before Mr. Nasrallah’s killing this week. “And so there is a lot of depression, especially with the latest escalation.”

But as has long been the case in tiny Lebanon, where different parties and sects are often influenced by a wide array of international actors, the reactions of foreign powers could affect the fallout.

Joshua Landis, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of Oklahoma, wrote on social media that efforts by Israel and the United States to push Lebanon to sever ties with Iranian influence and purge Hezbollah and its allies from the state could stoke unrest.

If Lebanese politicians call for the Lebanese military to spread and take control of the state, he added, they would face wariness and hostility from Hezbollah and its supporters, who will fear any attempt to completely disarm them.

Shiite forces and their allies, Mr. Landis said, “will resist, and Lebanon’s fragile stability will again be shattered.”

With a fragile government, a struggling economy and the competing motives of armed groups and foreign powers, Lebanon could slide from instability to greater violence, experts say. Sectarian conflict has long plagued the country, which was mired in civil war from 1975 until 1990.

That is why, even though many of Mr. Nasrallah’s rivals in Lebanon welcomed his death, Israel’s continued airstrikes after his killing could create new problems, said Nadim Shehadi, an independent Lebanese analyst.

“Israel is on a rampage and is its own worst enemy,” said Mr. Shehadi.

The longer the bombardment lasts, he said, the more it erodes divisions in the Middle East between those who want to fight Israel and those who would rather reach some kind of settlement with it.

“Israel is not making it easy to be on that other side,” he said. “Even the most moderate person, or the most Israel-friendly person in Lebanon, is shocked by the inhumanity that they have shown.”

Aryn Baker contributed reporting.