Fuad Shukar, a Hezbollah commander whom Israel believes it killed in an airstrike in Beirut on Tuesday, has been one of the group’s key military leaders since its founding by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards more than four decades ago.
Hezbollah sources said Shukr, a member of the Lebanese Shiite generation that founded Hezbollah during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, was a friend of the group’s late military commander Imad Mughniyeh, who was assassinated in Damascus in 2008.
The United States says Shukr, who is in his 60s, played a central role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American servicemen, and he has a bounty of up to $5 million on his head, according to the U.S. government’s Rewards for Justice website.
The Israeli military said the attack was a targeted strike against a Hezbollah commander responsible for an attack in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 children and teenagers over the weekend. Hezbollah has denied any role.
Israeli broadcast reports said the commander was killed.
Two security sources in Lebanon earlier said the target’s name was Shukr and he was the head of Hezbollah’s operations center. They said he was seriously wounded in the attack in the Haret Hreik area around Hezbollah’s Shura Council.
Shukr, also known as al-Haj Mohsen, is a special adviser to Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and a member of the Shura Council, the decision-making body, Hezbollah sources said.
Sources said he became more prominent in Hezbollah after the killing of Mugniyah — a suspect remembered as a military mastermind in Hezbollah who was on the US most wanted terrorists list and accused of plotting attacks on Western interests, including the Marine barracks.
Referring to those attacks and hostage-taking incidents in Lebanon in the 1980s, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah said in a 2022 interview with an Arabic broadcaster that they were carried out by small groups that had no connection to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah sources said Shukar fought Israeli troops during the Israeli invasion in 1982 alongside Mughniyeh and Mustafa Badreddin, another senior Hezbollah commander who was killed in Syria in 2016.
Announcing a bounty on his head in 2017, the US Rewards for Justice program said he was a senior Hezbollah military commander of the group’s forces in southern Lebanon and a member of Hezbollah’s supreme military body, the Jihad Council.
It also said he had played a key role in military operations in Syria, where Hezbollah deployed fighters in support of President Bashar al-Assad in the early years of the Syrian civil war.
At the time, Hezbollah rejected the charges against Shukar and another Hezbollah activist, Talal Hamiyah, for whom a bounty had been offered, saying they were “inaccurate and meaningless.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
