Israel PM Netanyahu's Army Scripts ‘Deadliest Day’ In Lebanon’s Beirut

A Hezbollah commander responsible for the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister was killed in a recent Israeli airstrike, Saudi media reported Sunday. The Al-Arabiya outlet said Salim Jamil Ayyash was killed, with unconfirmed reports on social media claiming he was struck near the Syrian city of al-Qusayr, a known Hezbollah stronghold. Ayyash, who had a $10 million reward from Washington on his head, was a senior member of Hezbollah’s Unit 151 assassination squad, according to the US State Department. In 2020, Ayyash was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a UN-backed tribunal over the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in a suicide bombing in Beirut in 2005. Then-Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli strike in late September, refused to hand him over to the authorities, alongside three other defendants who were eventually acquitted.