BEIRUT: The Zionist entity on Monday killed a top Hezbollah commander in a strike on south Lebanon, the Iran-backed group and a security official said, as regional tensions soar amid the Gaza war. Hezbollah in a statement announced the killing of a "commander” for the first time in three months of cross-border clashes with the Zionist forces.
It said Wissam Hassan Tawil had died "on the road to Jerusalem” — the phrase used by the movement for fighters killed by the Zionist entity. A security source told AFP that Tawil "had a leading role in managing Hezbollah’s operations in the south”, near the Zionist entity’s border. The official, requesting anonymity for security reasons, said that the commander, who held several other top positions in the group, "was killed in a (Zionist) strike targeting his car in the south”.
The Zionist military said it struck Hezbollah "military sites” in Lebanon on Monday, but did not immediately comment on Tawil’s death. Hezbollah released photographs of Tawil alongside leaders of the movement as well as top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who headed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations until he was killed in a US strike in 2020.
Other photos showed him beside Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and the group’s former top commander Imad Mughniyeh, killed in a 2008 car bombing in Syria blamed on the Zionist entity. Tawil also appeared alongside Hezbollah’s former military commander in Syria, Mustafa Badreddine, who died in 2016 and had been indicted by an international court for the killing of Lebanon’s former premier Rafic Hariri.
Tawil was the highest-ranking Hezbollah member to be killed since near-daily exchanges of fire with Israeli forces across the border began after the Zionist-Hamas war broke out on Oct 7. The killing of Hamas’s deputy leader in Beirut last week, in a missile strike widely attributed to the Zionist entity, has raised fears of a wider conflagration. Saleh Al-Aruri was the most high-profile Hamas figure to die during the three-month war, in the first attack on Beirut since the fighting began.
On Friday, Nasrallah warned Israel his fighters would respond swiftly to Aruri’s killing. The group claimed an attack on a Zionist air control base the next day. On Saturday, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell met in Beirut with Mohammed Raad, head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, as part of a push to avoid Lebanon being dragged into the Israel-Hamas conflict.
In November, Raad’s son was killed in a Zionist strike in south Lebanon along with five other Hezbollah members, the group had said. The cross-border violence has killed more than 180 people in Lebanon, including over 135 Hezbollah fighters, but also more than 20 civilians including three journalists, according to an AFP tally. – AFP