The commander of Iran's Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, who traveled to Lebanon following the elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli air strike last month, has not been heard from since strikes hit Beirut late last week, two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters on Sunday.
One of the officials reported that Qaani was in the Dahieh suburb of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, during a strike that was believed to have targeted senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine. However, the official clarified that Qaani was not meeting with Safieddine at the time.
A Hezbollah official stated that Israel had been preventing the search for Safieddine from progressing after bombing Beirut’s southern suburbs on Thursday. According to the officials, Hezbollah would only reveal Safieddine's fate once the search had concluded.
The Iranian official added that neither Iran nor Hezbollah had been able to establish contact with Qaani.
The second Iranian official confirmed that Qaani had traveled to Lebanon after Nasrallah's death, and that Iranian authorities had lost contact with him following the strike targeting Safieddine, who was widely expected to take over leadership of Hezbollah.
Qaani was named in 2020 as head of the Quds Force, replacing Qassem Soleimani, who was eliminated in a US drone strike outside of Baghdad’s airport in Iraq.
The Quds Force is the foreign operations arm of Iran's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and is on the US list of "foreign terrorist organizations".