The Israeli military said that top Hezbollah commander Hashem Safieddine was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut earlier this month.

Safieddine, the head of Hezbollah’s executive council, was widely tipped to succeed the late Hassan Nasrallah, following his assassination in an air strike in late September.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said he was killed in a strike on October 4 that targeted Hezbollah’s main underground intelligence headquarters in Beirut, which the army says was “in the heart of a civilian population” in the Lebanese capital’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh.

Hezbollah has not yet confirmed Safieddine’s death. 

In a statement, the IDF added that Safieddine was killed alongside the head of the Iran-backed terror groups’s intelligence division, Ali Hussein Hazima, as well as two dozen other intelligence operatives.