Iran seeks revenge for top commander killed in Israeli strike
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Thousands gathered in the Iranian capital on Thursday for the funeral of senior Revolutionary Guards commander Razi Moussavi, three days after he was killed in what Tehran says was an Israeli strike.
The crowd in Tehran’s central Imam Hossein square chanted “death to Israel” and “death to America”.
Many waved yellow flags imprinted with the message “I am your opponent” – a reference to Israel – in both Persian and Hebrew.
Israel has long fought a shadow war of assassinations and sabotage against arch foe Iran and its allies, but Moussavi’s killing in Syria came at a time of sharply heightened regional tensions over the Israel-Hamas conflict since early October.
Some of the mourners in Tehran carried pictures of Moussavi together with the revered Qasem Soleimani, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) foreign operations arm who was killed in a 2020 US drone strike in Baghdad.
Next, week Iran will mark the fourth anniversary of the death of Soleimani, who had run the IRGC’s Quds Force for more than a decade.
Iranian state media says an Israeli missile strike on Monday near the Syrian capital of Damascus killed Moussavi, a Quds Force general and the most senior Guards commander killed since Soleimani.
The Israeli army, which has launched hundreds of strikes on Iran-linked targets in war-torn Syria in recent years, said only that it does not comment on foreign media reports.
On Thursday, Syria said Moussavi’s “martyrdom” on its territory was part of Israel’s “aggressive policies”, the official news agency SANA reported.
In letters sent by the Syrian foreign ministry, Damascus called on the United Nations to act against Israeli actions which might “ignite the region”, SANA said.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, earlier on Thursday met with Moussavi’s family and led a prayer over the slain general’s body before it was taken to the central square.
The head of the Guards, Hossein Salami, hailed Moussavi as “one of the most experienced and effective IRGC commanders in the Axis of Resistance” – Tehran-aligned armed groups in the Middle East.
Ramezan Sharif, the IRGC spokesman, warned on Wednesday that “our response to Moussavi’s assassination will be a combination of direct action as well as [from] others led by the Axis of Resistance”.
Sharif charged that Israel’s killing of the general “was likely due to its failures” when Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Oct 7.
The attack resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on the latest official Israeli figures, and saw around 250 people taken hostage.
Israel has retaliated with a relentless bombardment, siege and ground invasion of Gaza that has killed at least 21,110 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory.
Iran, which supports Hamas financially and militarily, has hailed the deadly attacks as a “success” but denied any direct involvement.
“‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ was a completely Palestinian operation,” Salami said, using Hamas’s name for the Oct 7 attack, a day after remarks by spokesman Sharif seemed to suggest it was in part motivated by revenge for Soleimani’s killing.
“I say that the revenge for Hajj Qasem is a separate operation,” the Guards chief said.
