New Delhi: Reports claim that a Hezbollah commander, believed to be behind the assassination of a former Lebanese Prime Minister, was eliminated in an Israeli strike on Syria. The Hezbollah leader, identified as Salim Jamil Ayyash, was reportedly killed near the Syrian city of al-Qusayr, a known Hezbollah stronghold.
Ayyash, a senior member of Hezbollah’s Unit 121 assassination squad, carried a $10 million bounty from the United States, according to media reports. In 2020, he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a UN-backed tribunal for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in a suicide bombing in Beirut in 2005. However, former Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who was also killed in an Israeli strike in September this year, had refused to hand him over to authorities.
The report of Ayyash’s assassination coincides with intensified Israeli operations against the Iran-backed militant group. Israeli airstrikes have reportedly killed at least 23 people, including seven children, in Almat in Lebanon’s Mount Lebanon province, the Lebanese health ministry stated on Sunday. Additionally, three people were killed, and two others injured, in an Israeli strike on Mashghara in western Bekaa Valley on Saturday, while a separate strike on Sahmar, also in western Bekaa, left one dead and four injured.
Further escalating tensions, a strike from Lebanon on northern Israel wounded at least six people on Sunday, including three in an apparent anti-tank missile strike in the border town of Metula in Israel. The Lebanese health ministry claims that Israeli attacks have killed over 3,100 people and injured nearly 14,000 in Lebanon over the past year, including 619 women and 194 children.
