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.
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