Top military commander Mustafa Badreddine, who died in an explosion in Damascus, is the latest of a number of senior figures from the Lebanese Shiite guerrilla group to be killed in past years.
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He’d participated in most of the group’s operations since the early 1980s, the group said, releasing pictures of Badreddine in full military uniform.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, which has sanctioned Badreddine, his responsibilities included moving the group’s fighters from Lebanon to Syria as well as leading a major group offensive.
Unconfirmed reports had said an Israeli air raid targetted a Hezbollah arms convoy on the border near the Beirut-Damascus highway Tuesday night.
Hezbollah said it was investigating whether the explosion at the base was caused by an air strike, a missile attack or artillery bombardment. Ali Rizk, a political analyst and an expert on Hezbollah, told Al Jazeera that the attack targeted Hezbollah’s operations centre in Damascus.
Hezbollah Member of Parliament Nawar al Saheli also blamed Israel for the attack.
And despite a pledge to avenge the death of its previous military commander, Imad Mughniyeh, killed in Damascus in 2008, it failed to do so.
The Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV, which is close to Hezbollah, initially said Badreddine was killed in an Israeli airstrike but later removed the report. Mughniyeh was killed in Damascus in 2008 while his son, Jihad, perished in an Israeli strike that also killed other Hezbollah fighters in Syria previous year. “We decline to comment”, an Israeli military spokeswoman said. Still, he said, Badreddine was a hot-headed, impetuous commander, making him unpopular in some quarters of the group, in contrast to Mughaniyeh, a “cold, calculating experienced operator”.
Israel deems Hezbollah its most potent enemy and worries that it is becoming entrenched on its Syrian front and acquiring more advanced weaponry.
Lately, Badreddine was associated with the war in Syria, where Hezbollah has deployed thousands of fighters to help safeguard the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Badreddine was tried in absentia by the Hague tribunal over the killing of Rafik Hariri.
Mughniyeh was Badreddine’s brother-in-law, the two men are now buried side by side in the same cemetery in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
According to Yediot, Israel believed that Badreddine, who is among three top commanders who replaced Imad Mughniyeh, is implicated in the deadly bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Argentina in 1994 and an attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012.
“We don’t know if Israel is responsible for this”, Amidror said in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio.
Hezbollah has denied any role in Hariri’s death.
Over the past 30 years, Israel has killed some of the group’s top leaders. More recently, the USA government suspected him of running Hezbollah’s military operation in Syria.
These media sources added that various factors seem to indicate that there’s no connection between Badreddine’s death and Israel.
He was also labelled as “the overall controller of the operation” in which Hariri was killed. The Gulf countries are also expelling Lebanese expatriates they say have ties to Hezbollah. He was detained in Kuwait and jailed for years until he fled jail in 1990 after Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait.
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Israel is also believed to have played a key role in the assassination of Mughniyah in 2008. These include prominent figures Samir Qantar and Jihad Moughniyah, the son of Imad Moughniyah, who were killed in separate Israeli attacks a year ago.
