Who is Wafiq Safa, the reported target of the last night's Beirut strikes?
Raffi Berg
Digital Middle East editor
As emergency workers search through the rubble from Israel’s air strikes which killed 22 civilians, according to the Lebanese prime minister, in Beirut last night, the fate of the reported target, Wafiq Safa, is not yet known.
Safa has been a key figure in Hezbollah as far back as the 1980s, the decade the group was formed.
He is the head of its security apparatus, believed to be in charge of relations between the group and Lebanon’s security services.
He is also a brother-in-law of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israel at the end of last month.
Israeli and Western intelligence officials have long suspected Hezbollah of exerting control over Beirut international airport, and in June Safa was named by the UK’s Daily Telegraph as being involved in alleged operations there, including the storing of Iranian missiles and rockets.
The group and Lebanese authorities denied the paper’s claim, as well as accusations of influence at the airport, which is officially run by the Lebanese government.
In 2019, the US added Safa’s name to a blacklist of individuals accused of terrorism, for, it said, orchestrating the smuggling of drugs and weapons and of being involved in obtaining foreign passports for Hezbollah operatives for missions abroad.
For Israel, Safa has long been in its sights but is remembered for one event in particular. When in 2008, as part of a prisoner swap, Hezbollah released two Israeli soldiers it had held for two years, it was Safa who, the New York Times reported at the time, said their fate would “now be revealed”, before gesturing towards two coffins.
