Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in a powerful airstrike in Beirut constituted a use of its right to defend itself, a German foreign ministry spokesperson said, Reuters reports.

“Hezbollah is of course a terrorist organization and it was obviously a meeting of the top leadership of Hezbollah, from which one can assume, even from a distance, that they were planning their further operations,” the spokesperson said.

“So in this respect, there are also reasons to believe that the right to self-defence was exercised here,” he added.

Asked about the civilian deaths in the incident, the spokesperson said “every civilian victim is one civilian victim too many.”