Beirut Strike Kills a Quds Force Commander Promoted a Week Earlier

The Israel Defense Forces said they struck and killed Hassan Ali Marwan in Beirut, describing him as the commander of the Imam Hussein Division, a formation the military says the Iranian Quds Force uses to project power against Israel. According to the IDF statement, Marwan had been promoted to the post about a week earlier, after his predecessor, Ali Masalem Tabaja, was killed.

Marwan had previously served as the division's operations manager, the statement said, and in that capacity was responsible for building up its operatives and managing their deployment in southern Lebanon. As commander he was the link between the division and the military leaderships of both Hezbollah and the Quds Force, and he directed the launching of missiles, hostile aircraft and rockets at Israel and at Israeli forces operating in southern Lebanon. The IDF said he was the third commander of the division it has killed since Operation Northern Arrows against Hezbollah began in September 2024, and called the strike significant for the military capabilities of Iran and Hezbollah across the region.

What the Quds Force is

The Quds Force is the expeditionary arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and one of four branches within it. Its declared purpose is to organise Islamist movements abroad, raise funds and manage Iran's external relationships, and it operates through irregular warfare and proxy formations across the Middle East, according to research published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point in June 2023. In Syria alone the force has run specialised units for transport and logistics, financing and oil smuggling, and counter-intelligence, while Lebanese Hezbollah has served as its most visible militia partner, helping recruit, coordinate and train pro-Iranian fighters.

The division at the centre of the strike

The Imam Hussein Division was founded in 2016 under Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander killed by a US strike in Iraq in January 2020, and a leaked intelligence assessment reported by Newsweek in July 2023 described it as the Quds Force's most elite fighting force in Syria. That assessment put its strength at thousands of fighters (most of them Syrian, with others from Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Sudan), armed with precision-guided munitions and both attack and surveillance drones. One analyst quoted in the report called it “Hezbollah 2.0”, a reflection of the Lebanese movement's role in its formation.

Two years of decapitation strikes

The killing fits a pattern that began on 23 September 2024, when the IDF gave its offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon the name Operation Northern Arrows and struck some 1,300 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon over the course of the day, according to Times of Israel live coverage from that night. Israel has since repeatedly announced the killing of named commanders in Hezbollah and in Iranian-linked formations.

Beirut was under sustained Israeli attack in this period. Cross-border fighting resumed on 2 March 2026 and Israeli aircraft struck the Lebanese capital the following day, according to a timeline of the 2026 Lebanon war, while Times of Israel live coverage of 22 March recorded fifteen further Israeli air strikes on Hezbollah command centres in the Nabatieh area alone.

What is still unclear

The IDF did not give a date for the killing of Marwan's predecessor beyond “about a week” earlier, did not name the first of the three division commanders it says it has killed, and did not say where in Beirut the strike took place or whether anyone else was hurt. Its description of Marwan as both the division's operations manager and, previously, its commander is not explained. Neither Iran nor Hezbollah is quoted in the statement, and Israel.com has not independently verified the account.