Two loud explosions and chaos. It was a little after 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 10, when Beirut was shaken by two explosions which emptied the streets of the center of the Lebanese capital of passers-by and motorists, making way for ambulances rushing down the avenues, sirens wailing. , to or from the densely populated Ras Al-Nabaa district and the adjacent Basta district. While Beirut residents settled into a sort of “bombing routine” in recent days, which saw the Israeli air force daily targeting the southern suburbs of the capital, emptied of its inhabitants, the war suddenly invaded the heart of the city.
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The toll, twenty-two dead and one hundred and twenty injured, and the state of one of the two targeted buildings, collapsed and on fire, indicate that the Israeli air force gave itself the means to eliminate its target of the day, without more consideration for the lives of its neighbors and the inhabitants of the immediate surroundings. Since October 2023, more than 2,000 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli fire, including nearly 1,200 since September 23, according to a count by Agence France-Presse based on official figures.
According to Lebanese and Israeli security sources, the person targeted by Thursday’s two strikes was Wafik Safa, 64, a key figure in Hezbollah, relay of Hassan Nasrallah, the party leader killed in an Israeli strike at the end of September, to the Lebanese security services and other political factions. During the night, Al-Manar, the Shiite movement’s television channel, assured that Mr. Safa had survived the attacks: “The assassination attempt against the head of the Hezbollah coordination unit, Wafik Safa, failed. »
The US Treasury Department placed him on its sanctions list in 2019. He was then accused “to exploit Lebanon’s ports and border crossings to smuggle and facilitate travel” of goods and people for the benefit of Shiite training. Mr. Safa was notably considered one of those responsible for arms smuggling for the benefit of the organization. He played a major role in the prisoner exchange between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. Wafik Safa is also accused of having obstructed the investigation into the Beirut port explosion in 2020, in particular by threatening the main investigator, judge Tarek Bitar. Personal emissary of Nasrallah, Mr. Safa went to the United Arab Emirates in March, for the first public visit by a representative of Hezbollah to the Gulf monarchy.
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