Hamas deputy leader killed in alleged Israeli strike in Beirut

Hamas’s deputy leader abroad Saleh al-Arouri, wanted for years by Israel and seen as the group’s prime orchestrator of West Bank terrorism, was killed Tuesday evening in an Israeli strike in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, officials with Hamas and the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah said.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the blast was carried out by an Israeli drone.

Israeli officials declined to comment.

The explosion shook the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs, which are a stronghold of Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas. The explosion caused a fire on Hadi Nasrallah Street, south of Beirut.

Six people in total were reported killed in the explosion, a precision strike on a third-floor apartment said to serve as a Hamas office. Unconfirmed reports said two of the dead were Hamas figures who reported to Arouri.

Israel has vowed to target all leaders of Hamas after the terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw the abduction of over 240 others.

If Israel is behind the attack it could mark an escalation in the regional conflict. Hezbollah has been carrying out attacks against Israel’s north since the war in Gaza began, citing support for Hamas, leading to limited but daily clashes along the border amid concerns of a larger war.

People search for survivors following a massive explosion in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, on Tuesday, January 2, 2024, in which Hamas deputy chief Salah al-Arouri was killed. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to retaliate against any Israeli targeting of Palestinian officials in Lebanon. Arouri was regarded as close to Nasrallah, and was reportedly scheduled to meet with the Hezbollah leader on Wednesday.

Based in Lebanon, Arouri, 57, was one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, deputy head of the terror group’s political bureau and considered the de facto leader of Hamas’s military wing in the West Bank, though he has long resided elsewhere. He was regarded as the most notorious Hamas figure in orchestrating West Bank terrorism against Israel.

“The cowardly assassinations carried out by the Zionist occupation against the leaders and symbols of our Palestinian people inside and outside Palestine will not succeed in breaking the will and steadfastness of our people or in undermining the continuation of their valiant resistance,” senior Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq said in a statement, claiming that the strike “proves once again the abject failure of the enemy to achieve any of its aggressive goals in the Gaza Strip.”

The Ramallah branch of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party announced a general strike for Wednesday in response to the deadly strike.

MK Danny Danon (Likud) tweeted on X that he congratulated “the IDF, the Shin Bet, the Mossad and all security forces” for Arouri’s killing. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also tweeted, though more ambivalently, quoting the Book of Judges: “So let all thine enemies perish.”

Channel 12 reported that cabinet secretary Yossi Fuchs sent a directive to ministers ordering them not to speak publicly about the alleged Israeli strike. Neither Danon nor Smotrich deleted their tweets, however.

At a November 22 press conference in Tel Aviv held alongside members of the war cabinet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had “already instructed” the country’s Mossad spy agency to target the heads of Hamas “wherever they are.”