Senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri has been killed in an Israeli drone strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh, the Palestinian group and Lebanese media outlets say.
Al-Arouri was killed on Tuesday in a “treacherous Zionist strike”, Hamas said on its official channel. Hamas politburo member Izzat al-Sharq called it a “cowardly assassination”.
Al-Arouri was a senior official in Hamas’s politburo and was known to be deeply involved in its military affairs. He had previously headed the group’s presence in the occupied West Bank.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the blast killed at least six people and was carried out by an Israeli drone.
Hamas said al-Arouri’s killing would not “undermine the continued brave resistance” in Gaza, where the Palestinian group’s fighters are battling Israeli ground forces.
“It proves once more the utter failure of the enemy to achieve any of its aggressive goals in the Gaza Strip,” senior Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq said in a statement.
Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the United States news channel MSNBC that Israel had not taken responsibility for the attack but “whoever did it, it must be clear that this was not an attack on the Lebanese state”.
“Whoever did this did a surgical strike against the Hamas leadership,” Regev said in an interview.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati condemned the killing. His office said in a statement that the attack “aims to draw Lebanon into a new phase of confrontations” with Israel at a time when Hamas ally Hezbollah has been exchanging daily cross-border fire with Israeli forces in northern Israel, the statement said.
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