Who is Ibrahim Aqil, the Hezbollah commander killed in Israeli strike

Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in an airstrike on Beirut's southern suburbs on Friday, the Israeli military and two security sources in Lebanon said, sharply escalating the year-long conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed group.

The Israeli military said the slain Hezbollah commander, Ibrahim Aqil, who served on Hezbollah's top military body, was the acting commander of the group's elite Radwan force and that he was killed along with other senior commanders of the unit.

The news agency also reported that Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head for two 1983 Beirut truck bombings that killed more than 300 people at the American embassy and a US Marines barracks.

Aqil, who has also used the aliases Tahsin and Abdelqader, was the second member of Hezbollah's top military body, the Jihad Council, to be killed in two months after an Israeli strike in the same area targeted Fuad Shukr in July.

Israel escalated its attacks on the group this week after months of border fighting triggered by the conflict in Gaza that began on Oct. 7 with a deadly raid and hostage-taking in Israel by Hezbollah's Palestinian ally Hamas.

Like Shukr, Aqil is a veteran of Hezbollah, which was founded by Iran's Revolutionary Guards in the early 1980s to battle Israeli forces that had invaded and occupied Lebanon.

Born in a village in Lebanon's Beqaa valley sometime around 1960, Aqil had joined the other big Lebanese Shi'ite political movement, Amal, before switching to Hezbollah as a founding member, according to a security source.

The United States accuses him of a role in the Beirut truck bombings at the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 people, and a U.S. Marine barracks six months later that killed 241 people.

It further accused him of directing the abduction of American and German hostages in Lebanon and listed him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2019, putting a $7 million bounty on his head.

Referring to the bombing of the US Marine barracks and other attacks on Western interests in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a 2022 interview with an Arabic broadcaster that they were carried out by small groups not linked to Hezbollah.

Aqil's cohort of founding Hezbollah operatives helped turn the group from a shadowy militia into Lebanon's most powerful military and political organisation, pushing Israel from its occupation of the south in 2000 and fighting it again in 2006.

When Shukr was killed in July, it was seen as the heaviest blow to its command structure since the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, remembered by Hezbollah as a legendary commander but by Israel and the United States as a terrorist.

Aqil, whose bounty was set by the United States at an even higher value than that of Shukr's, may prove a similar blow.

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