BEIRUT — The Israeli military struck Hezbollah's headquarters in Beirut on Friday in a series of massive explosions that targeted the leader of the militant group and leveled multiple high-rise apartment buildings.
The biggest blast to hit the Lebanese capital in the past year appeared likely to push the escalating conflict closer to full-scale war. At least six people were killed and dozens were wounded, Lebanon's health ministry said.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was the target of the strikes on the group's headquarters, according to two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity, including one U.S. official. The Israeli army declined to comment on who it targeted. It was not immediately clear if Nasrallah was at the site, and Hezbollah did not comment on the report.
Smoke rises Friday from Israeli airstrikes in Beirut.
After the strikes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly cut short a visit to the United States to return home. Hours earlier, he addressed the U.N., vowing that Israel's intensified campaign against Hezbollah over the past two weeks would continue — further dimming hopes for an internationally backed cease-fire.
“Israel has every right to remove this threat and return our citizens to their home safely. And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Netanyahu said, eliciting applause from supporters in the gallery of the General Assembly. “We’ll continue degrading Hezbollah until all our objectives are met."
When Netanyahu entered the hall and was introduced, boos and raised voices echoed, and many delegates walked out.
News of the blasts came as Netanyahu briefed reporters after his U.N. address. A military aide whispered into his ear, and Netanyahu quickly ended the briefing.
Israeli army spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the strikes targeted the main Hezbollah headquarters, saying it was located underground beneath residential buildings.
Rescuers arrive at the site of an Israeli airstrike Friday in Beirut's southern suburbs.
The series of blasts around nightfall reduced six apartment towers to rubble in Haret Hreik, a densely populated, predominantly Shiite district of Beirut's Dahiyeh suburbs, according to Lebanon's national news agency. A wall of billowing black and orange smoke rose into the sky as windows were rattled and houses shaken some 18 miles north of Beirut.
The Health Ministry reported at least six people killed and 91 others wounded but said the figure was likely to rise as first responders were still searching under the rubble.
Footage showed rescue workers clambering over large slabs of concrete, surrounded by high piles of twisted metal and wreckage. Several craters were visible, one with a car toppled into it. A stream of residents carrying their belongings were seen fleeing along a main road out of the district.
To a degree unseen in past conflicts, Israel this week has aimed to eliminate Hezbollah's senior leadership. But an attempt to assassinate Nasrallah — successful or not — would be a major escalation. The Pentagon said the U.S. had no advance warning of the strikes.
A wounded man sits in an ambulance Friday at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut's southern suburbs.
Nasrallah has been in hiding for years, very rarely appearing in public. He regularly gives speeches, but always by video from unknown locations.
The site hit Friday evening had not been publicly known as Hezbollah's main headquarters, though it is located in the group's "security quarters," a heavily guarded part of Haret Hreik where it has offices and runs several nearby hospitals.
Israel dramatically intensified its airstrikes in Lebanon this week, saying it is determined to put an end to more than 11 months of Hezbollah fire into its territory. The escalated campaign has killed more than 720 people in Lebanon, including dozens of women and children, according to Health Ministry statistics.
Iranian-backed Hezbollah, the strongest armed force in Lebanon, began firing rockets into Israel almost immediately after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, saying it was a show of support for the Palestinians. Since then, it and the Israeli military traded fire almost daily, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee their homes on both sides of the border.
Mourners bury the bodies of their relatives Friday who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in the village of Karak, eastern Lebanon.
Hezbollah officials and their supporters remain defiant. Not long before the explosions Friday evening, thousands massed in another part of Beirut's suburbs for the funeral of three Hezbollah members killed in earlier strikes, including the head of the group's drone unit, Mohammed Surour.
Men and women in the giant crowd waved their fists in the air and chanted, "We will never accept humiliation" as they marched marched behind the three coffins, wrapped in the group's yellow flag.
Hussein Fadlallah, Hezbollah's top official in Beirut, said in a speech that no matter how many commanders Israel kills, the group has endless numbers of experienced fighters. He vowed that Hezbollah will keep fighting until Israel stops its offensive in Gaza.
"We will not abandon the support of Palestine, Jerusalem and oppressed Gaza," Fadlallah said. "There is no place for neutrality in this battle."
What are 'inauthentic influencers,' and what's their role in an election where democracy is on the ballot?
What are 'inauthentic influencers,' and what's their role in an election where democracy is on the ballot?
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"Biden's plan exposed on the news. Illegals voting in 2024 election. Take the poll & get your Free Trump gift! #Trump2024," a June advertisement on Facebook and Instagram from Patriot Sanctuary reads.
Accompanying the debunked statement that falsely implied President Joe Biden planned to have undocumented immigrants vote for him in the 2024 election is the Newsmax video where the claim originated and a call to action—take a poll and claim your free "In God We Trust" Trump hat and gold coin before they run out.
At the end of the poll, the user is prompted to enter credit card information on a page similar to other reported scams that promise free American flags and then make unsolicited charges to users' cards.
As candidates ramp up messaging ahead of the election, both Democrats and Republicans are leaning into the influencer economy, pushing their messages about how each will lead the country if elected in November. But, another kind of influencer has been running ads on popular social networks and may have changed the way you think about political subjects without you even realizing it.
They've been dubbed "inauthentic influencers," faceless networks of pages like Patriot Sanctuary entirely unaffiliated with legitimate political campaigns. They run paid advertisements to push misleading claims and, often, scams.
Collabstr analyzed the latest reports from the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship's ElectionGraph project to illustrate how so-called inauthentic influencers have sought to manipulate the decisions of voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
IDJC partnered with analytics company Neo4j to analyze trends in the Facebook social graph—a map of the connections between pages, users, and personal information underlying social networks. The report draws on an analysis of advertisements run on Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. It's worth noting that Neo4j performed its analysis before Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party candidate.
Researchers described finding a "massive amount of manipulation and misinformation targeting Americans" through what it calls inauthentic influencers on social media platforms. These are not your typical influencers marketing cosmetics and sneakers. Instead, they're networks of seemingly independent accounts with names like "Liberty Defender Group" and "Truly American" running nearly identical, coordinated political advertisements with no disclaimer.
In many cases, researchers found these networks pushing factually inaccurate and misleading claims as well as outright scams. Sometimes they're linked by common credentials like phone numbers and addresses, connections that aren't obvious to the users who see their ads in their feeds.
Inauthentic influencers potentially reach millions with manipulative content
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Ultimately, the IDJC identified 158 networks of these accounts collectively representing $8.5 million in ad spending and 504 million impressions from September 2023 through April 2024.
An impression is a count of every time a post appears on a user's screen while scrolling on a social network—whether or not they liked, shared, commented, or interacted with it at all. It provides the broadest possible picture of the impact a single post may have had on users.
For comparison, the analytics service Databox estimates that the entire apparel and footwear industry achieved 460,000 impressions via Facebook ads in one month in 2023. If extrapolated over the period of the IDCJ study, that could amount to roughly 3.68 million impressions—a fraction of the more than 500 million impressions made by inauthentic influencers.
Researchers categorized pages according to independent reviews by team members, Google searches to determine political party affiliation, and the Ad Fontes media bias scale. The team found that conservative-leaning pages spent $2.1 million more on ads over the period studied and recorded 315.4 million more impressions than progressive-leaning pages. And accounts falling into these ideological categories targeted different groups of Meta users across Facebook and Instagram.
Targeting older users in highly populous and swing states
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Those partisan pages were equally likely to target older users over younger ones with their posts, but there were differences in the gender of users targeted. Researchers drew a parallel between how progressive pages aligned with national political trends in targeting more women with their ads than men and how conservative-leaning pages targeted men more heavily.
The ads tended to push misleading information about different topics based on their ideological leanings, too. Among conservative influencer networks identified, immigration, the economy, safety, and foreign policy were the top issues. For progressive pages, the economy was an important issue, too, along with health and social issues, including abortion access, according to researchers.
MAGA swag and health benefits scams
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Aside from Donald Trump-related swag and financial scams from conservative-leaning pages, researchers found that progressive-leaning pages also commonly pushed health benefits-related scams to users they targeted with ads.
Facebook has since shut down the Patriot Sanctuary page and others identified in research from the IDJC, which makes its database of political ads on Meta available publicly. Researchers warn, however, that when one page is closed, another tends to pop up in its place.
Data from Meta also paints an incomplete picture of the networks of dishonest actors that could be working to fleece concerned citizens and manipulate voters. The company is the only major ad platform or social network that allows approved organizations access to its advertising data for study. Social networks, including X, formerly known as Twitter, and TikTok, do not offer the same access.
"It underscores that tech platforms need to do more to allow academics and journalists access to platform data so that political actors can be held to account with the American public," lead researcher Jennifer Stromer-Galley said in a statement.
Story editing by Carren Jao. Additional editing by Kelly Glass. Copy editing by Kristen Wegrzyn.
This story originally appeared on Collabstr and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
