BEIRUT (Reuters) -Senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri was killed on Tuesday night in an Israeli drone strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a stronghold of allied Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, three security sources told Reuters.
In response to questions from Reuters, the Israeli military said it does not respond to reports in the foreign media.
Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC that Israel had not taken responsibility for this attack, but “whoever did it, it must be clear: That this was not attack an attack on the Lebanese state.”
“Whoever did this did a surgical strike against the Hamas leadership,” Regev told MSNBC in an interview.
Arouri was a senior official in Hamas’s politburo and was also one of the founders of its military wing, the Qassam Brigades, which carried out a deadly assault in Israeli territory on Oct. 7. The U.S. had last year offered $5 million for information on him.
Hamas confirmed Arouri’s killing via the affiliated Al-Aqsa radio. Hamas politburo member Izzat al-Sharq said it was a “cowardly assassination.”
The Israeli drone struck a Hamas office in Dahiyeh on Tuesday night, leaving a total of six people dead, Lebanon’s state news agency reported. Security sources and medics could not immediately identify the other three killed.
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati condemned the explosion as a “new Israeli crime” and said it was an attempt to pull Lebanon into war.
A Reuters witness in Dahiyeh saw firefighters and paramedics gathered around a multi-storey building with a gaping hole in what appeared to be the third floor. Limbs and other pieces of flesh could be seen on the roadside.
Dahiyeh is a stronghold of powerful armed group Hezbollah, a Hamas ally. Hezbollah has been exchanging near-daily fire with Israel across Lebanon’s southern frontier since the eruption of hostilities between Hamas and the Israeli military in October.
Israeli air strikes and shelling have killed more than 100 Hezbollah fighters and nearly two dozen civilians, including children, elderly and several journalists, according to Hezbollah and security sources.
(Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Laila Bassam, Editing by William Maclean)
