Hezbollah commander dies in airstrike after phone call

Israel lured an elusive Hezbollah commander out of hiding with a mysterious phone call just before launching the deadly airstrike designed to kill him and provoke the terror group into vowing revenge, according to a new report.

Fuad Shukr, who had avoided even the United States for four decades, was killed on July 30 when he received a phone call in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah official told the Wall Street Journal.

In the evening phone call, the Hezbollah commander was instructed to go to the seventh floor of his building. But at around 7 p.m. an Israeli rocket hit the complex. According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, it killed him and his family and injured 70 other people.

Terrorist group officials believe the call came from someone who had penetrated Hezbollah's internal communications network, exposing flaws in Hezbollah's intelligence network that compromised one of its most senior and elusive leaders.

Shukr was one of Hezbollah's key founders and a staunch ally of Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah. Both supported the terror group's ongoing attacks on Israel since October 8.

Despite his high position, the commander had disappeared from the public spotlight since the Beirut bombings in 1983, when militants detonated two car bombs outside military barracks in the city, killing 241 US soldiers.

Shukr was so elusive that even the people who lived in the same building where he hid and operated had no idea who he was.

“He was like a ghost,” a neighbor who had never seen anyone at the facility told the Journal of Shukr.

The dark side of Hezbollah officials even followed him to the grave: after the air strike in July, the Lebanese media initially published photos of the wrong man.

Israeli forces had targeted Shukr after he allegedly gave the green light for the rocket attack on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights that killed 12 young people and injured 40 other civilians.

A few hours after Shukr's assassination, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a suspected Israeli bomb attack during a visit to Tehran.

Nasrallah has since vowed revenge on Israel. The Hezbollah leader threatened a direct attack on Israel. Officials fear that this could lead to an expansion of the war in the Gaza Strip to Lebanon.

Despite the rising tensions, daily attacks between the Israeli army and Hezbollah continued. On Saturday, Israel killed another high-ranking commander, Hussein Ibrahim Kassab.

The drone strike that killed Kassab came as Israel launched another airstrike on the southern town of Nabatieth, killing 10 people.

The terrorist group retaliated by firing 55 rockets at northern Israel. Some of the rockets fell in open areas and ignited numerous fires.

With post wires