- Israel killed longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike in Beirut on Friday.
- The Israeli military shared imagery of F-15I fighter jets taking off for the high-stakes mission.
- The aircraft were spotted carrying highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs.
The Israeli fighter jets that carried out the strike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday appear to have used US-made 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs to get the job done, according to imagery and munitions experts.
The Israeli Air Force published footage Saturday showing an F-15I fighter jet taking off the day before to execute the airstrikes on Hezbollah’s central headquarters in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
“Air Force planes in the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah and the Hezbollah headquarters in Lebanon,” the caption read.
The Israeli military also shared a still image of an F-15I taking off for the strike mission that shows the aircraft carrying BLU-109 bombs outfitted with Joint Direct Attack Munition kits, according to the Open Source Munitions Portal, a weapons identification site created by Airwars and Armament Research Services.
Israeli Air Force photo
The BLU-109 is a US-made air-to-ground munition that weighs 2,000 pounds. The hardened bomb is sometimes called a “bunker buster” because it is designed to penetrate fortified structures before exploding. The JDAM kit converts it from a simple dumb bomb into a precision-guided weapon known as a GBU-31.
Some defense analysts on social media also pointed out the 2,000-pound bombs on the jets in the Israeli Air Force footage. Other media outlets, including The New York Times with the assistance of a former US Air Force targeting specialist, also identified the bombs as BLU-109 in the imagery. And experts told the Associated Press that the craters were consistent with bombs of this size.
The Biden administration paused a shipment of the controversial 2,000-pound bombs to Israel earlier this year in response to concerns over the safety of civilians in Gaza. Even with their precision kits, these munitions can still cause significant collateral damage.
The Israeli military said on Friday that it targeted Hezbollah’s central headquarters located underneath residential buildings in a Beirut suburb. The devastating airstrikes obliterated several high-rise towers and caused immense destruction.
Amid questions about the fate of the group’s leadership, Hezbollah later confirmed that the strikes killed Nasrallah, the longtime leader of the Iran-backed militant group. President Joe Biden called his death “a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”
Nasrallah’s assassination marks a significant escalation in a year-long Middle East conflict that has shown no sign of stopping and has heightened fears that the volatile region could descend even further into violence.
The Israeli military continued to carry out strikes against Hezbollah targets on Sunday and also bombed the Yemen-based Houthis, another Iranian proxy force.
