Middle East crisis live: Hezbollah confirms death of commander Ibrahim Akil in Beirut airstrike

Further violence between Israel and Iran’s allies Hezbollah and Hamas could ignite a devastating regional conflict, the United Nations has warned, after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed at least 14 people including a senior Hezbollah leader and wounded 66.

Late on Friday, UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo said:

We risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far.”

Speaking at a meeting of the UN security council which had been convened to discuss Israel’s attacks, DiCarlo said:

It is not too late to avoid such folly. There is still room for diplomacy. I also strongly urge member states with influence over the parties to leverage it now.”

Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, repeated Washington’s assertions that the US had played no role in the attacks and called on all parties to “refrain from any actions which could plunge the region into a devastating war”.

Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, had earlier said Israel’s attacks would continue, writing on X:

The sequence of actions in the new phase will continue until our goal is achieved: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes.”

You can read more of the report by William Christou in Beirut and Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem here:

The Guardian’s international security correspondent, Jason Burke, has written a profile of Ibrahim Aqil who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday. Here is an extract:

Aqil, who was in his early 60s, had risen through the ranks and reached a senior position in the organisation. Exact details of his role are unclear, but the Israel Defense Forces described him as “the head of the Hezbollah terrorist organization’s operations team, the acting commander of the Radwan [special forces] unit”.

“He was one of the really senior old-timers but was never really the face of anything. He was always a number two or number three, but had just been promoted in the last five to 10 years,” said Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington and an expert on extremism in Lebanon.

Aqil was one of a group of young Shia men originally from the south of Lebanon but living in Beirut who were energised by the 1979 Iranian revolution and recruited by the country’s Revolutionary Guards into a network known initially as Islamic Jihad and then later as Hezbollah.

Their military aim, guided by their Iranian mentors, was to fight the US, which had dispatched a peacekeeping force to Beirut; and Israel, which had occupied much of Lebanon. Their political objective was to turn Lebanon into an Islamic state aligned with Tehran. Almost all have been killed since, probably by Israel.

You can read the full profile here:

Hezbollah has confirmed the death of Ibrahim Aqil, who sits on the group’s top military body and is wanted by the US in connection with the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing. Aqil was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Friday, along with several other members of the elite Radwan unit, which under his leadership was designed to conduct cross-border raids into Israel.

The group also said Ahmed Wahbi, a commander who oversaw the military operations of the Radwan unit during the Gaza war until early 2024, was also killed in the strike.

In its statement, Hezbollah said that Aqil led a “blessed life of jihad”.

In total, 14 were killed and at least 66 injured by the Israeli airstrike on a residential building in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Paramedics worked late into the night to retrieve survivors and bodies from under the rubble of the collapsed building.

Friday’s strike on Beirut came amid a sharp escalation by Israel of attacks against Hezbollah. At least 42 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured this week when explosives inserted into pagers and walkie-talkies commonly used by Hezbollah members were remotely detonated.

On Wednesday, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said the war with Hezbollah was entering a new phase and that the “centre of gravity” had shifted to fighting in northern Israel.

Here’s a recap of the latest developments:

• Israel submitted formal challenges to the international criminal court (ICC) on Friday over its jurisdiction and the legality of arrest warrant requests against Israeli leaders for their conduct of the Gaza war. In May the ICC’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, requested the court issue arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. “The state of Israel submitted today its official challenge to the ICC’s jurisdiction, as well as the legality of the prosecutor’s requests for arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and minister of defence,” the foreign ministry’s spokesperson, Oren Marmorstein, said on X. Khan also sought warrants against top Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

• The White House said it had seen “deeply disturbing” footage of Israeli soldiers pushing three apparently lifeless bodies from a rooftop during a raid in the occupied West Bank on Thursday. The incident took place in the town of Qabatiya in the northern West Bank, where the Israeli military has been carrying out large-scale raids since late August that the Palestinian health ministry says have killed dozens of people. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement: “This is a serious incident that does not coincide with IDF values ​​and the expectations from IDF soldiers. The incident is under review.” The IDF declined to comment when asked if the soldiers involved were being investigated.

• Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has postponed his trip to the US by a day due to the security situation in the country’s north. Netanyahu was due to travel to New York on 24 September, during which he is expected to address the annual UN general assembly. He issued a short statement after the Beirut airstrike, saying: “Our goals are clear, and our actions speak for themselves.”

• The UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, denounced the pager and walkie-talkie attacks in Lebanon, saying that they violated international law and could constitute a war crime. The UN’s political affairs chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, warned that if violence continues between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah, then “we risk seeing a conflagration that could dwarf even the devastation and suffering witnessed so far”.

• The UK’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, discussed preparations to evacuate remaining Britons from Lebanon, having already urged UK nationals to leave the country given the hostilities with Israel. The White House said Americans were strongly urged not to travel to Lebanon or to leave if they are already there.

• The US president, Joe Biden, said a ceasefire deal in Gaza was still realistic amid the escalating tensions in the region. “We’re going to keep at it until we get it done, but we’ve got a way to go,” Biden said in his first comments on the situation since the wave of explosions targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon.