Who is Saleh al-Arouri, the senior Hamas leader killed in Beirut?

Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy Hamas leader the group said was killed in a Beirut suburb on Tuesday, was accused of masterminding attacks on Israel and helping to forge closer relations between Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon to usher in. .

The head of Hamas operations in the West Bank, Mr al-Arouri, was killed in an explosion that also killed two leaders of the armed wing, Hamas said, blaming it on a “Zionist incursion”.

In recent years, Mr. al-Arouri has spent much of his time in Beirut, serving as a sort of Hamas ambassador to Hezbollah, according to regional security officials. He was also considered close to Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza.

In 2014, Israel accused Mr al-Arouri, then a Hamas commander, of planning the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Mr al-Arouri called the act “a heroic operation by the Qassam Brigades”, referring to Hamas’s military wing.

That year, Israel also accused Mr al-Arouri, who was in exile in Turkey at the time plotting to overthrow Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Mr. al-Arouri was elected vice chairman of Hamas’s political bureau in 2017, accelerating what analysts and Israeli officials said was a growing relationship between Hamas and Hezbollah. A few days after his election, he visited Tehran to strengthen ties with Iran, and shortly afterward met publicly to discuss cooperation with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, according to Palestinian news reports at the time.

In October, after the Hamas-led attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel, Mr. al-Arouri met with Mr. Nasrallah and Ziad Nakhale, the secretary general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Gaza-based militant group. The three discussed how to coordinate “to achieve total victory and stop the brutal attack on the oppressed people of Gaza and the West Bank,” according to Al-Manar, Hezbollah’s official broadcaster.

Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has spread along the Israel-Lebanon border, raising fears of a wider conflict that would attract Iranian-backed armed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Ben Hubbard reporting contributed.