Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei led the Friday prayers “for the first time in 5 years” and attended the commemoration ceremony of Hassan Nasrallah today. He hailed the ‘brilliant action’ by Iranian forces against the Israeli regime a few days back and called it legal. He said, “What our armed forces did was the least punishment for the crimes of the Zionist regime.”
The tensions escalated between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah ever since pager and walkie-talkie explosions marred Hezbollah, followed by Iran launching a barrage of missiles towards Israel. US president Joe Biden recently said, “I don’t believe there is going to be an all-out war. I think we can avoid it.”
In a significant escalation, Israel announced it struck Hezbollah’s intelligence nerve center in Beirut late Thursday. The Israeli Defense Forces confirmed the assassination of Mahmoud Yusef Anisi, described as a pivotal figure in Hezbollah’s missile production operations in Lebanon.
Following these events, Sky News Arabia reported from sources that Hashem Safieddine, a top Hezbollah official and considered a potential successor to Hassan Nasrallah, was the intended target in a fresh wave of Israeli attacks in the southern parts of Beirut. Concurrently, Israel’s Channel 12 disclosed that these “exceptional” strikes in the area were directed at the individual next in line after Nasrallah.
Additionally, in the early hours of Friday, the IDF reported the elimination of Zahi Yaser Abd al-Razeq Oufi, a leading Hamas figure, during an operation in Tulkarm, located in the West Bank. Concurrently, Tel Aviv experienced several explosions, signaling a broadening of the conflict’s scope.
