A state of anticipation prevails in Lebanon and the region, following the Israeli assassination of Saleh Al-Arouri, deputy head of the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), two leaders of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the movement’s military wing, and 4 others of its cadres, in an air strike targeting south of the capital, Beirut.

According to analysts, the assassination of Hamas leaders deep inside Lebanon, coinciding with the continuation of the war on Gaza and the confrontations in southern Lebanon, constitutes an unprecedented escalation and portends a major confrontation that may extend throughout the entire region, between the axis of resistance and Israel.

In an interview with Anatolia, Lebanese political analyst Qassem Kassir said that the assassination of Al-Arouri is a large and very dangerous operation, aiming to take the region towards a major confrontation. He added that there is no information about the nature of the response to the assassination yet, but he suggested that there will be an escalation in the confrontation regardless of the situation. Fronts.

For his part, the director of the Yabous Center for Studies, Suleiman Bisharat, said that the assassination puts the conflict at a crossroads, the first of which is the expansion and extension of the conflict to include all arenas, and the expansion of the scope of confrontation. The second, according to Bisharat, is that this assassination will be a price for Israeli acceptance at a high price. Political for Hezbollah and the resistance in Gaza.

Following the assassination, Hezbollah issued a statement in which it mourned Al-Arouri and his companions, threatening that this crime “will never pass without response and punishment.” The party considered the assassination a dangerous attack on Lebanon and its people, and a dangerous development in the course of the war between Israel and the axis of resistance. .

Late on Tuesday evening, Hezbollah fired 3 anti-tank missiles at the Upper Galilee in northern Israel, and said in a statement that its fighters targeted a group of Israeli soldiers in the vicinity of the Al-Marj site with appropriate weapons, killing and wounding its members.

Targeting the Lebanese depth

In turn, political analyst Tony Boulos said that the assassination of Al-Arouri is considered the most violent targeting in the Lebanese interior since the 2006 war, which means that Israel has dropped what was known as the rules of engagement, and no longer has red lines towards confronting Iran in the region, which portends greater targeting.

He stressed that the assassination of Al-Arouri in the southern suburb of Beirut put Hezbollah at a “very dangerous” crossroads, as it was forced to respond to save its face, but at the same time there is a problem that lies in the fact that it does not have an Iranian green light, given that Iran has not yet responded to the killing of the Revolutionary Guard leader, according to Paul.

Last August 28, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah warned that “any assassination on Lebanese soil that targets a Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Iranian, or others will have a strong reaction, and we will not allow the Lebanese arena to be opened to assassinations.”

The assassination in Beirut comes at a time when Lebanon's southern border has been witnessing daily confrontations and bombing between Hezbollah on the one hand and the Israeli army on the other since the eighth of last October, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries on both sides of the border.

The prominent Hamas leader spent more than 18 years in Israeli prisons, and was deported outside Palestine when he was released for the last time in 2010, where he was chosen as a member of the Hamas political bureau, then deputy head of its political bureau in October 2017, and a Hamas official in the West Bank.

Al-Arouri is considered one of the founders of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Hamas movement, where he began establishing the first nucleus of the movement’s military apparatus in the West Bank in the period between 1991 and 1992.

Source: Anadolu Agency