(Reuters) -Iran’s Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, who traveled to Lebanon after last month’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike, has not been heard from since the attacks on Beirut late last week, two senior Iranian security officials said. Reuters.
One of the officials said Qaani was in Beirut’s southern suburbs, known as Dahiyeh, during an attack that reportedly targeted senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine, but the official said he would not meet with Safieddine.
The official said Iran and Hezbollah had not been able to contact Qaani since then.
Israel has been attacking multiple targets in Dahiyeh as it carries out a campaign against the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.
The second official also said that Qaani had traveled to Lebanon after Nasrallah’s assassination and that Iranian authorities had not been able to contact him since the attack on Safieddine, who was expected to be Hezbollah’s next chief.
Hezbollah has so far made no comment on Safieddine.
Asked about reports that Qaani may have been killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut, Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said the results of the strikes were still being assessed.
He said Israel had carried out an attack late last week on Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters in Beirut.
“When we have more specific results from that attack, we will share them. There are many questions about who was there and who was not,” he said in a briefing with reporters.
The Quds Force, the foreign arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, oversees dealings with militias allied to Tehran across the Middle East, such as Hezbollah.
The commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, died with Nasrallah in his bunker when he was hit on September 27 by Israeli bombs.