Beirut, Sep 30 (IANS): Hezbollah has confirmed that the group's senior leader Ali Karaki, head of the southern front, was killed, along with top leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in the Israeli airstrikes targeting Beirut's southern suburbs.

Hezbollah said on Sunday in a statement that Karaki "was martyred with a group of his jihadist brothers in the enemy's criminal raid on Haret Hreik, accompanied by... Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah".

On Friday evening, Israeli warplanes launched airstrikes on Hezbollah's main headquarters in Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut, during which Nasrallah and some other commanders of the armed group were killed, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has claimed on Sunday that it killed Nabil Qaouk, the commander of Hezbollah's Preventive Security Unit and a member of Hezbollah's central council, in an airstrike on Saturday. It gave no detail on where the strike took place.

The IDF said that Qaouk was "considered to be close to the top of" Hezbollah and "was directly engaged in promoting terrorist designs against the State of Israel and its citizens, even in recent days".

The US designated Qaouk a global terrorist in October 2020, saying he had represented Hezbollah at events commemorating deceased Hezbollah terrorists as well as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Qasem Soleimani, who died in a US drone strike in January 2020.

The raids flattened several residential buildings, resulting in at least six deaths, 91 injuries, and significant infrastructure damage in the neighbourhood, local media reported earlier.

These heavy assaults mark the latest escalation of the ongoing clashes between Israel and Hezbollah, which began on October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah started launching rockets at Israel in solidarity with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, prompting Israel's retaliatory artillery fire and airstrikes in southeastern Lebanon.