Israel reportedly used 2,000-pound bombs in the strike to kill the Hezbollah chief

• Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an airstrike in Beirut on Friday.
• The Israeli military has shared images of F-15I fighter jets taking off for the high-stakes mission.
• The aircraft was seen carrying 2,000 pounds of highly destructive bombs.

Israeli warplanes that carried out the strike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday appear to have used 2,000-pound US-made bombs to do the job, according to imagery and munitions experts.

The Israeli Air Force released footage on Saturday showing an F-15I fighter jet taking off a day earlier to carry out airstrikes on Hezbollah’s headquarters in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

“Air Force jets in taking out Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah HQ in Lebanon,” the caption reads.

The Israeli military also shared a still image of an F-15I taking off for the strike mission, showing the aircraft carrying BLU-109 bombs equipped with Joint Direct Attack Munition kits, according to the Open Source Munitions Portal, an identification site of weapons created by the Air Warfare and Armament Research Services.

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 turns it from a simple dumb bomb into a precision guided weapon known as the GBU-31.

Some defense analysts on social media also pointed to the 2,000-pound bombs on the planes 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-109s in the footage. And experts told The Associated Press that the craters were consistent with bombs of that size.

The Biden administration halted a shipment of the controversial 2,000-pound bombs to Israel earlier this year in response to concerns about the safety of civilians in Gaza. Even with their accuracy kits, these munitions can cause significant collateral damage.

The Israeli military said on Friday it had targeted Hezbollah’s headquarters, located under residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut. Devastating airstrikes destroyed several tall towers and caused immense destruction.

Amid questions about the fate of the group’s leadership, Hezbollah later confirmed that the strikes had 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 signs of abating and raised fears that the volatile region could descend further into violence.

The Israeli military continued to carry out strikes against Hezbollah targets on Sunday and also bombed Yemen’s Houthis, another Iranian proxy force.