By Michelle Nichols and Don Durfee
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Senior Hezbollah commanders were the target of Israel’s strike on the group’s central headquarters in Beirut’s suburbs on Friday but it was too early to say whether the attack took out its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a senior Israeli official said on Friday.
“I think it’s too early to say, but, you know, it’s a question of time. Sometimes they hide the fact when we succeed,” the official said when asked if the Israeli strike on Friday had killed Nasrallah.
The Israeli military said it had targeted Iran-backed Hezbollah’s central headquarters in Beirut in an attack that shook the Lebanese capital.
Asked how long it might take to determine the fate of Nasrallah, the senior Israeli official said: “Certainly if he’s alive, you’ll know it very immediately. If he’s dead, it may take some time.”
The official, who was briefing reporters in New York on condition of anonymity, said: “We cannot survive if we don’t stop this and reverse it,” he said, referring to the threat to Israel from Iran-backed militia in the region.
“It’s impossible to reverse it without a general war. That was the assumption, a general war with Hezbollah, which, of course, entails the possibility of a broader war with Iran.”
“The other way to do it was to take him out. That’s the only thing. If you take him out, you not only neutralize, possibly neutralize that front, because nothing else will, but you also break a lynchpin. You break a central axis of the axis.”
“About 10 days ago or two weeks ago, the cabinet made a decision that we cannot have – after a year – Israelis who are basically refugees in their own land,” the official said.
“So we added a formal war aim to bring our people back, to degrade Hezbollah’s power, to be able to push them back from the border, to destroy the infrastructure along the border, to change the balance of forces.”
“The most important thing that we did was to try to take out about half of the missile and rocket capabilities that he built up over the last 30 years with Iran, and to take it out in a few hours. And we did,” the official said.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols and Don Durfee; Editing by Howard Goller)
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