BEIRUT: A former bodyguard for Hassan Nasrallah, the slain leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, was killed Saturday in an Israeli strike in Iran, an official from the Tehran-backed militant group said.
For more than a week, Israel has been carrying out waves of air attacks on Iranian targets in the foes’ worst confrontation in history.
Israel assassinated Nasrallah in a strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 27 last year, during a war that left Hezbollah severely weakened.
His former bodyguard Hussein Khalil — commonly known as Abu Ali, and nicknamed Nasrallah’s “shield” — was killed in Iran near the Iraqi border, the Hezbollah official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
An Iraqi border guard officer told AFP that Khalil and a member of an Iraqi armed group were killed by “an Israeli drone strike” after crossing into the neighboring country.
The Iraqi group, the Sayyed Al-Shuhada Brigades, said that the commander of its security unit, Haider Al-Moussawi, was killed in the “Zionist attack,” along with Khalil and his son Mahdi.
The former bodyguard had appeared alongside Nasrallah for years during the leader’s rare public appearances.
The two men also shared family ties, with one of Khalil’s sons married to a granddaughter of Nasrallah.
During Nasrallah’s funeral in February, Khalil stood atop the vehicle carrying the slain leader’s body.
The funeral drew a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people, the first mass event organized by Hezbollah since the end of its war with Israel.
Separately, five children were wounded in Iraq on Saturday by fallen debris from a missile near the town of Dujail in the northern province of Salaheddin, security and medical sources told AFP on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the media.
The children sustained moderate and minor injuries, a medical source said.
A security source in the area confirmed the children were wounded by “a fallen fragment from a missile.”
The origin of the missile was not clear.
Since Israel launched its unprecedented attack on Iran last week, Iranian missiles and drones have been crossing paths with Israeli warplanes in the skies over Iraq, forcing Iraq to close its airspace to commercial traffic.
