Middle East Crisis: Live Updates: With Death Toll Rising, Tensions Run High After Israeli Strike in Beirut

Hezbollah released the names of more than a dozen members killed, as well as the leader of its elite Radwan force, Ahmed Wahbi. A day earlier, Hezbollah confirmed the death of the founder of the force, Ibrahim Aqeel, who had been overseeing its operations against Israel and was long wanted by the United States.

The airstrike was the latest in a string of apparent Israeli attacks against the Iran-backed group this week, operations that have yet again stoked the risk of escalation. The region is awaiting signs of how Hezbollah, Iran’s most important regional ally, might respond.

The strike leveled two high-rise apartment buildings in the densely populated southern suburb of Beirut where the Lebanese militia holds sway. On Saturday, rescuers had brought in more heavy vehicles in an effort to find those thought to be missing beneath the rubble.

Israel has been signaling for days that it planned to shift some of its military focus north toward Hezbollah in Lebanon and away from Gaza — which it has put under heavy bombardment for nearly a year since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks. Hezbollah had been launching daily rocket fire on northern Israel in what it called a “support. front” for its ally Hamas. Hezbollah has vowed to continue its strikes until Israel and Hamas reach a cease-fire. Tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border have been displaced by the intensifying exchange.

Here’s what else you should know:

• Device attacks: The airstrike followed quickly on the heels of two days of chaos across Lebanon, when pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members exploded en masse. Hospitals were filled with thousands of wounded, many missing eyes or fingers, and a sense anger and panic has spread across the country. At least 37 were killed in those operations, which intelligence officials attributed to Israel.

• Calls to investigate: Members of the United Nations Security Council called on Friday for an investigation into the operations in Lebanon — widely attributed to Israel — that detonated the pagers and walkie-talkies. The nature of the attacks, which transformed ordinary objects into weapons, raised alarms and drew widespread condemnation at the meeting.

• Heavy bombardment: The building struck on Friday in Beirut’s southern suburbs was one of more than 100 sites, mostly in southern Lebanon, that Israel has targeted since Thursday evening. Lebanese officials said the strikes overnight were some of the heaviest bombardment there in months of back-and-forth attacks. Earlier Friday, Israel said Hezbollah fired at least 140 rockets into northern Israel. Israel said its air defenses had intercepted some of the rockets and that others had fallen in unpopulated areas.

• Hezbollah scrambles: Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, sounded defiant in a speech on Thursday, saying that the group would not cease the cross-border strikes against Israel. But the group was also struggling to formulate an appropriate response to the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, analysts said. Mr. Nasrallah said it had formed committees to investigate the lapses that led the pagers and radios to be compromised.

On Friday, the Lebanese group Hezbollah announced that Ibrahim Aqeel — one of its top military commanders and a man the United States accused of helping to plan the 1983 bombings — had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a building in the southern Beirut neighborhoods that are a Hezbollah stronghold.

Not far from where he died, just on the other side of Beirut’s international airport, on Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a Mercedes truck packed with a massive amount of explosives into a barracks housing sleeping peacekeepers from the U.S. Marine Corps. The stupendous explosion felt across the capital killed 241 American service members and injured more than 100 others.

The toll in the Marine Corps, with 220 dead, was its worse single-day loss since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. A second suicide bomber who drove into a building housing French peacekeeping forces killed an additional 60 soldiers.

Six months earlier, a similar attack that pancaked the U.S. Embassy in Beirut had killed 17 Americans, including the core of the C.I.A. station in the Middle East, as well as 32 Lebanese and 14 others.

The murderous attacks were claimed by the Islamic Jihad Organization, considered a precursor to Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese militia and political organization built and backed by Iran to advance its interests in the region.

In the years since, the United States government singled out Mr. Aqeel, believed to be in his mid-60s, as a “specially designated global terrorist” with a $7 million bounty on his head. He was also believed to have been involved in some of the kidnappings of Western hostages in Beirut in the 1980s as well as attacks in France. Several other senior figures considered to be involved have also been killed in the current conflict.

Imad Mughniyeh, believed to be behind both the suicide bombings and numerous kidnappings, died in a car bombing in Damascus, Syria, in 2008.

The United States and several European nations had deployed a peacekeeping force in Beirut in 1982, meant to assure stability in the capital as the armed fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization withdrew from the city as part of the deal to end an Israeli invasion.

As time passed, however, the foreign forces were increasingly drawn into the fray. The effort to push the United States to withdraw its troops culminated in the two suicide bombings. Although not unprecedented at that time, no such bombings had been done on that scale before, and it ushered in a new era of similar attacks.

In addition, although President Ronald Reagan vowed that the American peacekeeping force would stay, as did other European governments, they were withdrawn within months. The bombings had achieved their aim.

It was the worst but hardly the only attack against American diplomats in the city, and it prompted a strengthening of security measures for U.S. diplomatic missions and military installations around the world. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut, for example, is now an armed fortress on a hill north of Beirut, and the U.S. ambassador moves around in a long motorcade of armored S.U.V.s.

The attacks came not long after the 1979 revolution in Iran that gave birth to the Islamic Republic, and they also ushered in that country’s violent efforts to assert itself in the region through proxy forces.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

“These attacks represent a new development in warfare, where communication tools become weapons, simultaneously exploding across marketplaces, on street corners and in homes as daily life unfolds,” Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, told council members. He added that the operations had unleashed “widespread fear, panic and horror” among people in Lebanon, who now fear that any device may be vulnerable.

“This cannot be the new normal,” Mr. Türk said, calling for an “independent, transparent and thorough” investigation into the attacks and accountability for the perpetrators, who he said had violated the rules of war and human rights law.

His sentiments were echoed by several council members.

Pascale Baeriswyl, Switzerland’s representative, expressed “grave concern” about the exploding devices and called the developments “extremely worrying.” She added that “light must be shed on the circumstances and responsibilities” and noted that “war has rules.”

Similarly, Algeria’s representative, Amar Bendjama, who had called for the meeting, said the “unprecedented” attacks had opened “a dangerous Pandora’s box.”

Some on the council instead focused on Hezbollah’s role in escalating tensions, as well as the roles of the group’s backers in Iran.

“The Security Council cannot ignore the origins of this conflict between Israel and Hezbollah,” said Robert A. Wood, a U.S. ambassador to the U.N. He noted that all parties to the conflict were expected to follow international humanitarian law but argued that Hezbollah had shattered stability in the region when it began striking Israel’s northern border in solidarity with Hamas following the Oct. 7 attack that set off the war in Gaza.

Britain’s representative, James Kariuki, took a similar approach. “Hezbollah launched an unprovoked attack on Israel on Oct. 8, 2023,” he said, adding that Britain was “resolute” in its “support for Israel’s right to defend its citizens.”

Both the British and American representatives also blamed Iran for fueling tensions in the region by supplying Hezbollah with weapons, and they accused Iran of undermining the Lebanese people’s hopes of living in peace.

All the council members appeared unified on one matter, however, calling for restraint from everyone involved in the conflict to prevent an escalation that could lead to a regional war. “Now is the time for calm heads,” Mr. Kariuki said.

Now, Israel is attempting a riskier playbook. It has markedly increased the intensity of its attacks in an attempt to force Hezbollah to back down, while raising the chances of the opposite outcome: a more aggressive response from Hezbollah that devolves into an unbridled land war.

Israel has sabotaged Hezbollah’s communications devices, blowing up hundreds, if not thousands, of them in a widespread cyberattack. Its fighter jets have pounded southern Lebanon with rare intensity. And on Friday afternoon, they struck Beirut, the Lebanese capital, for the first time since July — killing a senior Hezbollah military commander, according to Israeli officials, and collapsing two buildings, according to Lebanese officials.

Yet, despite the escalation, the fundamental balance between the two sides appeared to remain unchanged on Friday afternoon, at least for the time being.

Israel’s moves fell short of a decisive blow, humiliating Hezbollah and spreading horror through Lebanese society, but so far failing to coerce the militia into changing course.

The militia launched more short-range strikes on northern Israel on Friday, hours after its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, pledged to continue its campaign until Israel ends its parallel conflict in Gaza, which began with deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October. But the strikes this week appeared to be tit-for-tat attacks of the kind have been conducted for 11 months.

Hezbollah has pledged a specific response to Israel’s attacks on its pagers and walkie-talkies, which killed at least 37 people and injured thousands more. But it has not set a time frame for retaliation, a possible sign that, with so many of its operatives in the hospital, the group is still taking stock of its losses.

Israel’s leaders have said the conflict has entered a new phase, with Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, promising on Thursday that Hezbollah would pay an increasing price “as time goes by.” But he stopped well short of pledging a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

The Israeli military has said it moved a paratrooper division to northern Israel but does not appear to be on the cusp of a major ground maneuver, even as its air force and intelligence agencies scale up their attacks.

For now, both the conflict in Lebanon and the war in Gaza are stuck in limbo: The Israel-Hezbollah conflict seems unlikely to ease without a truce in Gaza, and negotiations to reach that truce have ground nearly to a halt amid persistent differences between Israel and Hamas.

Both conflicts appear far from a military resolution, too. For all its new moves, Israel still seems several steps away from a decisive military blow in Lebanon, and has failed to achieve one in Gaza, despite decimating Hamas’s forces there. The group still holds dozens of hostages in the pockets of Gaza that it controls, preventing Israel from declaring victory.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

Believed to be in his 60s, he had already survived multiple assassination attempts, and the United States had offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for his capture.

A member of Hezbollah more or less since its establishment in the 1980s, Mr. Aqeel served on the group’s highest military body, the Jihad Council. Over the past two decades, Israel has slowly killed many of the Jihad Council’s members, who are some of the closest advisers to Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

U.S. officials wanted Mr. Aqeel for his role in two bombing attacks in 1983 that killed more than 350 people at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks, many of them American citizens, according to the State Department.

Last year, the State Department posted a reward of up to $7 million for information leading to his identification, location, arrest or conviction. It said Mr. Aqeel also directed the abduction of American and German hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, described Mr. Aqeel as the chief of Hezbollah’s military operations directorate and the de facto commander of the Radwan force, an elite commando unit. He was responsible for overseeing Hezbollah’s anti-tank missile units and air-defense operations, among other roles, Admiral Hagari said.

“Aqeel had large amounts of blood on his hands,” he told reporters at a news conference. “He was responsible for the deaths of many civilians and innocents.”

Mr. Aqeel helped plan a never-carried-out Hezbollah invasion of northern Israel similar to that of the Hamas-led assault of southern Israel on Oct. 7, Admiral Hagari said.

Israeli officials have long warned that Hezbollah hoped to one day send its highly trained fighters across the border, conquering Israeli towns and seizing hostages in a bloody blow to their foes.

In 2019, Mr. Nasrallah confirmed that the group had operational plans for entering northern Israel in the event of a war but declined to give details. The Israeli military says it has uncovered multiple cross-border tunnels intended to facilitate such an attack.

Israel assassinated another member of Hezbollah’s Jihad Council, Fuad Shukr, in late July, in another airstrike on a building in Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut. Former U.S. officials called Mr. Shukr, like Mr. Aqeel, one of Hezbollah’s most senior military leaders and a confidant of Mr. Nasrallah.

Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general, said on Friday that Mr. Aqeel was effectively the top operations officer in Hezbollah’s military apparatus, one who was involved in “numerous” attacks against Israelis.

“He’s an extremely seasoned operations veteran,” said General Orion, a former Israeli military liaison to the international peacekeeping mission along the Lebanese-Israeli border.

Israel had tried to assassinate Mr. Aqeel numerous times in the past, but each time he managed to escape with his life, General Orion said.

In 2000, Israeli helicopters fired on Mr. Aqeel’s car in an attempt to avenge the killing of a Lebanese militia leader aligned with Israel, but he survived with only slight injuries. Five civilians were also lightly wounded, including an infant.