On Friday, the aftermath of Israel’s overnight bombardment of a Hezbollah stronghold near Beirut and the apparent expansion of the Israeli ground invasion in Lebanon’s south made a new framework for the fighting increasingly clear: Israel is taking the fight against Hezbollah to an entirely new scale.

Overnight, Israel carried out an airstrike in the Dahiya, a cluster of suburbs just south of Beirut, near where, just a week earlier, it had assassinated Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. This time, Israeli warplanes targeted his presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine. It remained unclear Friday whether Safieddine had been killed in the strike, which set off huge explosions and left part of the densely populated area known as the Dahiya a ruined landscape of jagged concrete, twisted metal and smoldering debris.

In addition to Israel’s systematic targeting of Hezbollah’s remaining leadership — whose movements Israeli intelligence apparently are still able to track — the country seems set to grow its ground operations in Lebanon’s south, where it is seeking to halt Hezbollah’s rocket fire into northern Israel. New evacuation orders Israel issued Friday brought to 87 the total number of Lebanese communities whose residents Israel has told to leave.

Nearly a dozen of Israel’s soldiers have been killed in clashes so far, including two killed in northern Israel that the military announced Friday.

Hezbollah began firing on northern Israel the day after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, in solidarity with its ally Hamas, leading to nearly a year of tit-for-tat strikes. But now, Israel appears prepared to wage a full-fledged war with the Lebanese militant and political group — a development that people in the region had long both feared and expected.

Growing, too, are concerns that Hezbollah’s backer, Iran, could be drawn more directly into a full-blown war with Israel.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Friday of further strikes against Israel “if necessary,” speaking days after Iran launched nearly 200 missiles at Israel in retaliation for its killing of leaders of Iranian-backed groups. In a rare sermon in Tehran, he also memorialized Nasrallah, his friend and ally; praised the Oct. 7 attacks as “logical;” and, in Arabic, expressed solidarity with Palestinians and Hezbollah.

But even as he did so, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was in Beirut, appearing eager to convey Iran’s readiness to support a joint cease-fire in Lebanon and in the Gaza Strip. The contrasting diplomacy and defiance spotlighted Iran’s efforts to assert its regional power while limiting damage to its land and people.