He Was Rebuilding Hezbollah—Until an Israeli Missile Found Him in Beirut

Israel had spent a decade trying to kill Haytham Ali Tabatabai when it found the top Hezbollah military commander over the weekend in an apartment in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

The veteran militant—born to a Lebanese mother and Iranian father—had risen through the ranks and helped build out Tehran’s broader network of militias surrounding Israel. He led the Lebanese militia’s forces in Syria when they intervened to defend Bashar al-Assad’s regime and was deployed to Yemen to help train the Iran-backed Houthis.

His most recent job was rebuilding Hezbollah itself after its battering in a two-month war with Israel a year ago. That was the role that ultimately got him killed.

In an operation an Israeli military official said was called “Black Friday,” after the post-Thanksgiving shopping day, Israel identified Tabatabai’s whereabouts and hit the building with missiles fired from an F-15. The strike was aimed at degrading the group’s rebuilding effort, but was also a signal.

“It’s a message to all the commanders of Hezbollah and the government of Lebanon,” said Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security adviser. “They promised to disarm Hezbollah, and they didn’t. They have to understand that if they don’t do it, Israel will.”

Israel and the U.S. have ratcheted up the pressure on Lebanon’s government over the stalled pace of efforts to disarm Hezbollah, sparking concerns that a year-old cease-fire could fall apart and tip the country back into war.

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Arab and Israeli intelligence shows Iran-backed Hezbollah is restocking rockets, antitank missiles and artillery, the Journal has reported. Some of those weapons are coming in via seaports and weakened, but still functional smuggling routes through Syria—or being manufactured by Hezbollah itself.

“[Tabatabai] was the head of the whole attempt,” said Amidror, who is now a fellow at the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security of America. “They tried to smuggle from Syria, tried to rebuild facilities in Lebanon, training new recruits. All of that was under his command and control.”