Hezbollah: Assassination of resistance commanders will not advance Israeli plots

Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has strongly denounced the killing of a senior commander of the Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad, saying such targeted killings will never help the Israeli regime advance its fiendish plots.

The Lebanese resistance movement, in a statement released late on Sunday, announced that the “heinous crime” of assassinating Ali Ramzi al-Aswad, 31, in the countryside outside the Syrian capital of Damascus “bears the hallmarks of the Zionist enemy.”

“The targeted killings of commanders and fighters from resistance movements will in no way help the Zionist enemy materialize the plots which it has heavily counted on. On the contrary, such moves will heighten the vigilance of our peoples,” the statement read.

“This crime comes at a time when the Israeli enemy is dealing with the strikes that resistance forces are carrying out against it throughout the occupied Palestinian territories,” Hezbollah stated.

The al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad group, said earlier that Aswad was killed on Sunday morning in the Damascus countryside in a “cowardly assassination with bullets bearing the fingerprints of the Zionist enemy.”

“The assassination was carried out by direct shooting near his house,” an Islamic Jihad official, who asked not to be named, told AFP news agency.

The Islamic Jihad also said that the late commander’s family had been displaced from the city of Haifa in 1948 and settled in the refugee camps in Syria, where he joined the organization as a young man.

Back on November 12, 2019, Syrian state media said that Israel had launched a missile attack targeting the home of an Islamic Jihad official in the Syrian capital, killing his son and granddaughter.

A Syrian official said at the time that Israeli fighter jets fired three missiles towards Damascus, one of which was intercepted while the other two struck the home of Islamic Jihad political leader Akram al-Ajouri in Mezzah, a western district of the city.

Ajouri’s son Muath and granddaughter Batoul were killed while nine others were wounded, the official said.

Islamic Jihad said Ajouri survived the attack on his home and blamed the “Zionist criminal enemy.”