Presumed portrait of al-Radwan commander Ahmad Ballout. Photo taken from social media.
BEIRUT — Rescuers recovered six bodies from the site of last week’s Israeli strike on Haret Hreik, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, but Hezbollah-affiliated health officials told L’Orient-Le Jour Monday they could not yet confirm whether one of them was Ahmad Ghaleb Ballout, a commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force.
Online reports circulated Monday claiming rescuers had recovered Ballout’s body from the rubble of the apartment targeted in Wednesday’s strike. Several Iranian, Israeli, and Lebanese social media accounts also shared purported photos of the victim.
A source within Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Committee told L’Orient-Le Jour that rescuers recovered two bodies on the day of the strike and four more on Sunday.
Asked whether Ballout was among the victims, the source said authorities sent the bodies for DNA testing and had not yet received the results. A spokesperson for the Health Ministry said it had no details regarding the number of victims killed by the Israeli strike.
The strike marked the first Israeli attack on Beirut’s southern suburbs since the cease-fire.
Little information is publicly available about Ballout, whose alias may have been “Malek,” according to one of the portraits circulated online.
Israeli military Arabic-language spokesperson Ella Waweya claimed Ballout had held “a series of positions within the Radwan Force over the years,” including operations commander.
She said Ballout led Radwan Force fighters during the war and directed dozens of attacks against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, including anti-tank missile attacks and improvised explosive device operations.
A source close to Hezbollah, quoted last week by Al Jazeera, said Ballout “is not among the key figures in the group’s military structure.”
The Radwan Force is one of Hezbollah's elite military units. The group reportedly established the force in the 1990s under the names Rapid Intervention Force, Intervention Unit, or Unit 125 before renaming it after Imad Mughnieh, also known as Hajj Radwan, a senior Hezbollah commander killed in Syria in 2008.
In November 2025, Israel killed Haitham Ali Tabatabai, then commander of the Radwan Force and a figure wanted by U.S. authorities.
The Israeli army also claimed in a report published in December 2025 that it had killed several other senior Hezbollah military officials that year, including Hassan Kamal, who headed anti-tank missile operations on the southern front, and Khodr Said Hashem, commander of the Radwan Force’s naval unit.
