Israel’s military pounded Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Sunday as it also carried out a strike against another Iranian-backed adversary, the Houthis, in Yemen.
The attacks in Lebanon are part of a major escalation of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah over the past two weeks, after nearly a year of trading cross-border fire. This has increased the threat of an all-out regional war that could potentially draw in Iran, whose proxies include Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas in Gaza. In recent weeks, the Houthis have launched missiles at targets in Israel — and Israel’s military said the strikes on Sunday were a response.
The attack in Yemen came after Israel’s military said on Sunday that it had struck dozens of targets in Lebanon, including rocket launchers and buildings that it said were used for storing weapons,and announced that it had further targeted the group’s top leadership. At least four people were killed in eastern Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry.
At least one strike hit the same area south of Beirut where Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed on Friday in an attack that Israel’s military said had hit the militia’s underground headquarters. On Sunday, video showed the extent of the damage in that area.
Mr. Nasrallah was a beacon for anti-Israel forces across the Middle East and beyond, and his death is a major blow to Hezbollah. It deprives the organization of a leader whose stature, experience, political relationships and rhetoric served as a powerful unifying force.
Both Hezbollah and Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, have vowed to continue fighting.
Here’s what else to know:
Hezbollah’s leadership: Two days after Mr. Nasrallah was killed and one day after announcing his death, Hezbollah has yet to provide information about his funeral — or name his successor. In the meantime, several other senior Hezbollah leaders have been confirmed dead. The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had killed Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of the group’s central council, in an airstrike a day earlier. Hezbollah confirmed that death and also that of Ali Karaki, another top commander.
Israeli prime minister: Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement on Saturday that he had ordered the assassination of Mr. Nasrallah because he could have rebuilt Hezbollah, no matter how battered. Mr. Netanyahu said that his death was necessary to advance Israel’s goal of allowing tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel to return home. He said the work was “still incomplete.” Israel’s strikes in Lebanon in recent days have been a moment of triumph for the Israeli leader.
The toll in Lebanon: The health ministry in Lebanon said that 14 paramedics had been killed over the past two days and that about half a million people had been displaced in recent weeks. Thousands of people have camped on the streets and beaches of Beirut, where some reacted to Mr. Nasrallah’s death with grief and shock. The World Food Program said it had plans to provide food assistance for up to a million people in shelters.
International reaction: The White House wants a cease-fire and a diplomatic solution rather than all-out war, President Biden’s national security spokesman, John F. Kirby, told CNN on Sunday. For its part, Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer, has reacted with caution to Mr. Nasrallah’s killing. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, mourned publicly, calling on all Muslims to rise against Israel, but did not pledge retaliation or revenge.
Farnaz Fassihi and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
Matthew Cassel
Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon
Entire families from the bombed neighborhoods south of Beirut had initially sought refuge across the city, with many sleeping in Martyrs' Square, a site steeped in history. By Sunday, their numbers had noticeably dwindled as many found shelter with relatives, friends or through support from aid organizations.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, also said today that efforts were still underway to achieve a political settlement to halt the fighting, telling a news conference that there was “no choice but the diplomatic option.”
A Houthi spokesman, Nasruddin Amer, wrote on X that Israel had attacked the port city of Hodeidah in Yemen, without saying what had been hit. Al Jazeera is broadcasting footage of smoke rising over the city. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Lebanon’s health ministry said that at least four people were killed today as a result of Israeli strikes on two towns in eastern Lebanon. There was no immediate comment from the ministry on other deaths in the region that have been reported by state-run media.
In the usually bustling center of Jdeede, a predominately Sunni neighborhood in Beirut, few people were on the sidewalks late this afternoon. Among those who were, many were looking up toward the sky, trying to spot the drone they could hear buzzing overhead.
Lebanon’s health ministry said that 14 paramedics have been killed amid Israeli bombardment over the past two days. It also said that an overnight Israeli strike in eastern Lebanon caused “major damage” to a hospital, temporarily putting it out of service.
John F. Kirby, President Biden’s national security spokesman, reiterated this morning that the White House wants a ceasefire and a diplomatic solution rather than all-out war. He acnowledged to CNN that there had been civilian casualties in the Israeli strike that killed Nasrallah, while saying that the Hezbollah leader was "a known terrorist, a guy with American blood on his hands as well as Israeli blood on his hands. This is a terrorist organization. He was the leader of it. And I think people are safer without him walking around.”
The trendy Mar Mikhael area of East Beirut, where young Beirutis hang out and drink expertly mixed cocktails in normal times, still shows signs of life today — unlike other neighborhoods, which have turned into ghost towns. But some of the chic cafes, bars and restaurants are not serving today. Instead, they’ve transformed themselves into community kitchens to feed displaced people who have crowded into shelters around the country.
Beirut is rattled. The sound of drones has hung over the capital all day. After the news of Hassan Nasrallah’s death yesterday, shops and restaurants closed their doors until further notice, their owners likely fearing sectarian violence or further escalation in the war. There are few people walking in the streets, but many displaced families are simply sitting down in public places, and many parked cars are serving as cramped shelters.
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Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
The Israeli military said more than 20 other militants were killed in its strikes on Friday near Beirut that assassinated the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Among the others killed were Ibrahim Hussein Jazini, the director of Nasrallah’s security unit; Samir Tawfiq Dib, an adviser to Nasrallah; and Abed al-Amir Muhammad Sablini, the head of Hezbollah’s force build-up, according to a statement from the military.
The health ministry of Lebanon said in its last update on Saturday evening that 11 people had been killed and 108 wounded in strikes on Friday, but it didn’t clarify whether that was the toll from the strikes targeting Nasrallah or from Israeli attacks in Lebanon more broadly. Lebanese health officials have said the death toll from the Nasrallah attack would likely rise because people were trapped under the rubble.
Four Palestinians were killed and several others were wounded in an Israeli strike today on a school in the northern Gaza Strip where displaced families were sheltering, according to the Palestinian civil defense. The Israeli military said in a statement that it struck Hamas militants who were using the school-turned-shelter as a command and control center. It did not provide evidence of its claim.
The Israeli military said it had carried out a “precise strike” in Dahiya, the densely populated area south of Beirut where it assassinated Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. It did not immediately provide details.
Hezbollah just confirmed the death of Ali Karaki, one of the armed group’s remaining top military commanders, in the massive Israeli airstrike that killed its leader Hassan Nasrallah. The Israeli military had announced his death on Saturday, based on its own intelligence assessments.
Showing a photo of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah at a gathering in Tehran on Saturday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Two days after the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed by Israeli bombs south of Beirut and one day after announcing his death, the armed group has yet to provide information about his funeral — or name his successor.
An escalating series of Israeli attacks in Lebanon over the last two weeks has killed and wounded many of Hezbollah’s members and senior leaders, including Mr. Nasrallah, a towering figure who led the group for more than three decades.
Hezbollah has vowed to keep fighting. The absence of a large-scale retaliation by the group against Israel so far has led some experts to believe that the attacks have left Hezbollah in disarray, with so many of its people incapacitated and its communications so compromised that it would struggle to mount a major counterattack. But some United States officials have warned that it would be premature to consider Hezbollah defeated, given the size of its arsenal and its history of adapting to blows from Israel.
Islamic custom usually calls for the dead to be buried swiftly, but Hezbollah most likely wants to give Mr. Nasrallah, a beacon for the group and its anti-Israeli allies across the Middle East, a funeral befitting his stature. It is not clear what of Mr. Nasrallah’s remains have been recovered from the site of the bombing, which left a gaping crater, and continued Israeli strikes on the area, a Hezbollah stronghold, have likely complicated efforts to plan what would in normal times be a mass gathering.
Hezbollah has not named Mr. Nasrallah’s successor nor indicated when it would. Recent Israeli airstrikes have killed a number of Hezbollah’s other longtime military and political leaders.
Officials in Lebanon, Israel and the United States expect Mr. Nasrallah’s replacement to be Hashem Safieddine, one of his cousins.
Mr. Safieddine is part of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, although he has nothing close to Mr. Nasrallah’s public profile. Another senior figure who is still alive is Mr. Nasrallah’s deputy, Naim Qassim.
The Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, said that as many as one million people could be displaced from their homes by the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, and he reiterated his call for a cease-fire. “The government is doing everything possible within its limited resources to manage the growing crisis,” he said in remarks reported by the country’s information ministry. Mikati is a caretaker prime minister in a government crippled by deadlock and an economic crisis.
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Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Mikati also announced some measures to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. Around 10 percent of Lebanon’s population of more than five million has been displaced by the recent fighting, according to the country’s health ministry.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke on Friday at the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, capped an increasingly brazen sequence of escalatory moves that reflected the Israeli prime minister’s renewed confidence in Israel’s military strength as well as in his own ability to navigate and defy foreign criticism, analysts said.
Mr. Netanyahu’s authorization of the strike came a day after the United States, Israel’s main benefactor, called for a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. It occurred on the same afternoon that foreign diplomats walked out of his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, protesting the conduct of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. And it came amid growing pressure on judges at the International Criminal Court to order his arrest on war crimes charges.
Last October, Mr. Netanyahu canceled a similar attack against Mr. Nasrallah following American pressure to call it off and internal doubts about Israel’s ability to fight on two fronts in Gaza and Lebanon after its failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. His popularity plummeted after the Hamas raid, with polls repeatedly suggesting that he would easily lose power if a snap election was called.
Nearly a year later, Mr. Netanyahu appears far less deterred by either foreign pressure or domestic frailty. Fighting in Gaza has slowed, allowing the Israeli military to focus on Hezbollah, while Mr. Netanyahu did not even consult with the United States before authorizing the strike on Friday, according to U.S. officials.
“King Bibi is back,” said Nachman Shai, a former cabinet minister, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “If you compare Bibi now to Bibi 10 months ago, he’s a different person. He’s full of confidence.”
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Mourning Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, on Saturday in Palestine Square in Tehran.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
These devastating blows have yet to translate into clear strategic gains. Israel’s main aim is to allow more than 60,000 displaced Israelis back to their homes near the border, but Hezbollah is still firing brief rocket barrages there, preventing Mr. Netanyahu from achieving that goal.
Still, his moves have defied — and, at least for now, undermined — warnings by allies and foes alike that an escalation risked setting off a broader regional war involving Iran, Hezbollah’s benefactor, and its other Middle Eastern proxies.
Instead, each attack significantly harmed Hezbollah without provoking unmanageable responses from the militia or Iran, at least for the time being. Hezbollah has not yet responded with an avalanche of long-range missile attacks that analysts and officials had predicted would overwhelm Israel’s air defenses and destroy its power grid and other key infrastructure. Daily life in Israel continued on Sunday morning while Hezbollah was in disarray.
Mr. Netanyahu’s sense of achievement could ebb quickly if Hezbollah or Iran does suddenly respond with much deadlier rocket strikes, Mr. Shai said.
“But for the time being,” he said, “Bibi feels at the height of his power.”
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Displaced people seeking refuge at Martyrs’ Square on Sunday in Beirut, Lebanon.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Mr. Netanyahu’s growing confidence, some analysts say, has been partly fostered by the Biden administration’s reluctance to rein him in at earlier stages in the war.
Since October, President Biden and his aides have sometimes criticized Mr. Netanyahu’s government for the conduct of its campaign in Gaza, for failing to conclude a cease-fire deal with Hamas and for being too slow to send aid to Gazans. The United States also successfully deterred the planned attack on Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, last October.
But apart from briefly freezing one shipment of arms, Washington has rarely followed its criticism with practical consequences, continuing to provide Mr. Netanyahu’s government with diplomatic cover at the United Nations and billions of dollars’ worth of arms. Israel has strong bipartisan support in the United States, with both Democratic and Republican leaderships wary of criticizing Israeli policy, particularly in the run-up to the presidential election.
“Netanyahu feels he can continue manipulating them because, other than expressing their dissatisfaction, they’re doing nothing,” said Alon Pinkas, an analyst and former Israeli consul-general in New York.
“It’s worsened or intensified as we got closer to the U.S. election,” Mr. Pinkas said, adding that Mr. Biden seemed wary of taking any measure that might damage Kamala Harris’s chances of defeating Donald J. Trump in November.
Mr. Netanyahu’s moves also occurred against the backdrop of growing domestic pressure to act against Hezbollah.
The conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militia began during Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon in the 1980s. This round of fighting started in October, when Hezbollah began firing on Israeli positions in solidarity with Hamas, which had just raided Israel. The Israeli military fired back, leading to a low-intensity border war that both sides have so far avoided turning into an all-out ground conflict.
Still, the fighting displaced hundreds of thousands of people on either side of the border, including more than 60,000 in northern Israel. And the plight of those displaced Israelis led to growing calls for the prime minister to authorize a more decisive military campaign, including from a far-right party that holds the balance of power in Mr. Netanyahu’s fragile coalition government.
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Smoke rising after an Israeli strike on Friday in the south of Beirut.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
The day before the strike on Mr. Nasrallah, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of that party, threatened to quit the government if Mr. Netanyahu agreed to a truce with Hezbollah instead of defeating it by force.
“When your enemy is on his knees, you do not allow him to recover,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said in a statement.
Some analysts also believe Mr. Netanyahu was spurred by a desire to atone for his government’s failure to prevent Hamas’s atrocities last October. The attack on Oct. 7 was the deadliest day of war in Israel’s history, ruining Mr. Netanyahu’s self-image as the guardian of Israel’s security. For years, Mr. Netanyahu had sought to contain Hamas instead of seeking its ouster, facilitating a deal with Qatar that helped the group survive financially, making it easier for Hamas to prepare for the surprise attack.
Mr. Netanyahu is “convinced that the only way to absolve himself, potentially, for Oct. 7 is to do something spectacular in Lebanon,” Mr. Pinkas said.
Others say that Mr. Netanyahu has long been wary of military adventurism. On Sunday morning, Israeli columnists speculated that he was in fact reluctantly cajoled into action by the military and intelligence leaders who masterminded and promoted the attacks on Hezbollah, as well as by fortuitous circumstances.
For example, the decision to explode hundreds of Hezbollah pagers this month was expedited by the fear that the militia was about to discover that the devices were compromised. That forced Mr. Netanyahu to choose between using the method immediately or losing it forever.
Just a day earlier, Mr. Netanyahu had been considering whether to fire the defense minister who oversaw the operation, Yoav Gallant, before postponing that move on the afternoon of the attack. For some, that chaotic dynamic created the impression that Mr. Netanyahu was making last-minute moves rather than enacting a carefully planned strategy.
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A funeral in Beirut this month for people killed by exploding pagers.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Past Israeli leaders may have been swifter to act, according to Michael Stephens, an expert on the Middle East at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based foreign affairs research group.
“The situation in the north is something no Israeli leader would have tolerated,” Mr. Stephens said. “Standing firm against international pressure while aggressively pursuing Israel’s security interests is just very Israeli. It’s not uniquely Bibi.”
Whatever his prior motivations, the risk now for Mr. Netanyahu is that he becomes hubristic, pursuing even grander military aims that ultimately backfire, analysts said.
In particular, Mr. Netanyahu faces calls to invade southern Lebanon and destroy the group’s border fortifications, which threaten Israeli communities close to Lebanon. Such a move could capitalize on Hezbollah’s weakness, but it also risks sucking Israel’s infantry into an unwinnable ground war on unfamiliar enemy territory.
Despite its losses, Hezbollah has yet to collapse. It could still claw back the initiative with support from Iran.
“These are all shifting moments,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “What looks good today may not look good tomorrow.”
Victories in Lebanon will also have little direct effect on either the negotiations between Israel and Hamas for a cease-fire and hostage release deal in Gaza, or the fighting on the ground there. Israeli soldiers have decimated Hamas but are struggling to deliver a winning blow. The remaining Hamas leaders are believed to be surrounded by hostages, making them difficult to attack and conclusively defeat.
And the killing of Lebanese leaders in Lebanon will not resolve Israel’s longest-running challenge: its conflict with the Palestinians, who still seek a sovereign state regardless of Mr. Netanyahu’s moves against Hezbollah.
“Israeli governments have been carrying out assassinations for decades,” wrote Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian Israeli lawmaker, in a social media post after Mr. Nasrallah’s assassination. “It did not promote security and did not stop any war,” he added.
Some clear video footage is starting to emerge showing the extent of the damage in the densely populated suburbs of Beirut where Israel said it targeted the headquarters of Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In this video distributed by The Associated Press, smoke is still rising on Sunday morning from the remains of the buildings destroyed in the airstrikes.
The Israeli military said that it had killed a senior Hezbollah official, Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of the group’s central council, in an airstrike in Lebanon on Saturday. Hezbollah has not confirmed his death.
The World Food Program said it had started an emergency operation to provide food assistance for up to a million people in shelters across Lebanon who were displaced by Israeli strikes in recent days. “A further acceleration of the conflict this weekend underscored the need for an immediate humanitarian response,” the U.N. agency said in a statement on Sunday.
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Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Jordan's military said that a missile launched from southern Lebanon had fallen on Saturday in the desert southeast of Amman. The unusual incident caused some panic on social media, and the military urged Jordanians not to spread rumors. It did not say who had fired the missile or what its intended target might have been.
Although it has been largely uninvolved in regional conflicts, Jordan helped intercept missiles and drones that Iran fired at Israel in April, after an airstrike that was widely attributed to Israel killed senior Iranian officers in Syria.
The Lebanese army has issued a statement calling on citizens to “refrain from actions that could harm civil peace during this critical and sensitive period in our nation’s history.” There are fears that Nasrallah’s death could fuel unrest in Lebanon between supporters and political rivals.
Government supporters in Tehran’s Palestine Square mourning the death of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, on Saturday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
In the turbulent landscape of the Middle East, Iran’s aging supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could always rely on the close alliance, unwavering loyalty and deep friendship of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
When Israel killed Mr. Nasrallah in a massive airstrike on Friday, it abruptly wiped out a singular force in Mr. Khamenei’s hierarchy of close associates.
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.
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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran, in Tehran in May. Iranian officials said that Mr. Khamenei had been deeply shaken by Mr. Nasrallah’s death.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
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.
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President Masoud Pezeshkian at the United Nations in New York on Tuesday. Mr. Pezeshkian told world leaders at the General Assembly that his government wanted to lower tensions.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times
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.
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A billboard in Tehran depicts Qassim Suleimani, an assassinated Iranian general, and Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader killed in Iran in July.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
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.
A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.
The video showed eight planes fitted with at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the American-manufactured BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. These bombs, a type of munition known as bunker busters, can penetrate underground before detonating.
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.
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 at least seven of those munitions. Then the video shows a plane returning at dusk to the Israeli air base without any bombs.
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CreditCredit...Israel Defense Forces via Telegram
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.
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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.
A correction was made on Sept. 29, 2024: An earlier version of this report misstated the number of munitions carried by an Israeli military plane. It was at least seven, not six.
Devon Lum, Aaron Boxerman, Eric Schmitt and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting. McKinnon de Kuyper contributed video editing.
Children preparing to make shelter and beds at Martyrs’ Square in Beirut on Saturday. Many displaced residents of southern Beirut had fled there to escape Israeli bombardment.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Reeling from relentless Israeli bombardment that has shaken its most powerful political force, Lebanon faces a potentially dangerous moment, riddled with pitfalls that could entangle it in all-out war.
But, experts say, the battering of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah may also present a faint opportunity to end years of political deadlock that has mired the state in chaos and dysfunction.
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.”
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Smoke rising from Israeli strikes in the suburbs of Beirut on Saturday.![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/09/29/multimedia/29mideast-carousel-gbmc/29mideast-carousel-gbmc-threeByTwoMediumAt2X.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
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