Israel targets Hezbollah’s top leader in Beirut

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Friday, just one hour before the Israeli air force targeted Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in a strike on the group’s headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. It is unclear if Nasrallah was harmed in the attack.

The two near-simultaneous events presented a dramatic split screen as Western diplomats scramble to avert a potentially catastrophic all-out war between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group.

The Pentagon said on Friday that Israel did not give the United States advance notice of the attack and that Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin learned of the strike as it was underway during a phone call with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant.

In the wake of the strike, the Israeli prime minister cut his visit to New York short and is now scheduled to return to Israel on Friday evening, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon confirmed.

Netanyahu used his address to UNGA to rail against Iran and its proxies as well as to denounce the world body as an “anti-Israel flat earth society.” The comments came a day after he appeared to reject a US-backed proposal calling for a cease-fire in Lebanon.

In his speech, which came almost a year after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, Netanyahu underscored Israel’s right to defend itself against “savage enemies” who seek Israel’s “annihilation,” including Tehran-backed militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. Complete with the use of stylised maps as props, Netanyahu warned that Iran’s aggression and radicalism pose a “dark future of despair” for Israel as well as others in the region.

“I have a message for the tyrants of Tehran: If you strike us, we will strike you,” Netanyahu said. “There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach, and that is true of the entire Middle East.”

Swaths of seats in the cavernous General Assembly Hall sat empty during Netanyahu’s address as thousands of anti-war and pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the UN headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Supporters in the balcony, including families of Israeli hostages flown in with the prime minister, cheered at several points during the speech.

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, which began last October, has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians and displaced more than 2.1 million people. With the onset of that war and in solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah began launching rocket, missile, and drone attacks against Israel; the two sides have traded fire across the Israel-Lebanon border almost daily ever since. That conflict has escalated dramatically in recent days, with Israel’s most recent bombing campaign in Lebanon killing more than 700 people since Monday alone.

World leaders, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib, took to the UNGA stage this week and condemned Israel, calling for an end to its fighting in Gaza and Lebanon.

“This madness cannot continue,” Abbas said in his speech on Thursday. “The entire world is responsible for what is happening to our people,” he added, explicitly slamming the United States for blocking three draft UN Security Council resolutions over the past year calling for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza.

In his speech, also on Thursday, the Lebanese foreign minister said that “the future of Lebanon’s people is imperiled.” “What we are currently experiencing in Lebanon is due to the absence of a sustainable solution to the root of the crisis, which is occupation,” he added.