Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
Israel has said it is sending military reinforcements to its northern frontier after the Lebanon-based Hezbollah group threatened retaliation over the killing of one of its members in an attack in Syria earlier this week.
The Israeli army said on its Twitter account on Thursday that the move was “in accordance with a situational assessment”.
In accordance with a recently conducted situational assessment, we have decided to reinforce the Northern Command with select infantry forces.
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) July 23, 2020
The Hezbollah-run broadcaster al-Manar identified the man killed in Monday’s air raid near Damascus International Airport as Ali Kamel Mohsen. The attack also killed four other foreign fighters and was widely attributed to Israel, which has carried out dozens of aerial assaults against what it says are fighters inside Syria.
Hezbollah legislator Sheikh Hassan Ezzedine said during Mohsen’s funeral that “the war between us and this enemy [Israel] will continue and this path that the martyrs have taken with their blood will continue”.
Israel did not comment on this week’s attacks as it generally refrains from discussing its activities in neighboring Syria, but it has acknowledged conducting many raids inside Syria since the start of the war in 2011.
Formed in the early 1980s, Hezbollah fought off Israel in a 2006 war that highlighted the group’s military capabilities.
It was able to overwhelm Israel’s ground invasion of southern Lebanon and attack military and civilian targets, undermining support for the war inside Israel.
Hezbollah has pledged in the past to retaliate for any fighter that Israel kills in Syria. The group fired a barrage of anti-tank missiles into Israel on September 1 last year after two of its fighters were killed in an Israeli air raid near Damascus days earlier.
