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Israeli forces have killed the would-be successors of , Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday, without naming them.
“We’ve degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. We took out thousands of terrorists, including Nasrallah himself and Nasrallah’s replacement, and the replacement of the replacement,” Netanyahu said in a pre-recorded video message.
Netanyahu did not identify by name Nasrallah’s replacement that he claimed Israel had killed.
Israel killed Nasrallah in a September air strike on Beirut.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Hashem Safieddine, the man expected to succeed Nasrallah, had probably been “eliminated”. It was not immediately clear who Netanyahu meant in his comments by the “replacement of the replacement”.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel last October 8, a day after Hamas militants attacked southern Israel from Gaza. Hezbollah cited solidarity with Hamas.
Some 60,000 Israeli citizens in the country’s north have been forced to leave their homes, while Israel’s stated objective is to make its northern areas safe from Hezbollah rocket fire and allow those displaced residents to return.
Lebanon ground operations extended
It comes as Israel’s military said it had sent the 146th Division into south Lebanon, the first reserve division to have been deployed over the border, and was extending ground operations against Hezbollah from southeast Lebanon into its southwest.
A military statement did not specify how many soldiers were now inside Lebanon. But the military had previously announced that three other army divisions were operating there, meaning that thousands of soldiers were likely on Lebanese soil.
The Israeli military announced on 1 October that ground forces had entered Lebanon, initially with commando units that were then followed by regular armoured units and infantry units.
In northern Israel not far from the Lebanon border, warning sirens sounded regularly throughout Tuesday as authorities said Hezbollah fired almost 200 rockets into Israel.
Targets again included Haifa, the northern port city where there were multiple reports of damage to buildings from missile debris. Israel’s military said it had struck the launchers that fired the missiles at Haifa.
The mushrooming Israeli-Hezbollah conflict has killed well over 1,000 people in Lebanon in the past two weeks and prompted the mass flight of more than a million.
Israel’s stated objective is to make its northern areas safe from Hezbollah rocket fire and allow thousands of displaced residents to return.
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