Beirut:
A senior adviser to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards was killed in an Israeli airstrike outside the Syrian capital Damascus on Monday, three security sources and Iranian state media said.
The adviser, known as Seyyed Razi Mousavi, was responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Syria and Iran, sources told Reuters.
“I will not comment on foreign reports, these or other reports in the Middle East,” IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in response to a reporter’s question at a nightly press conference. “Obviously the job of the Israeli military is to protect Israel’s security interests.”
Iran’s state television interrupted its regular news broadcasts to announce that Mousavi had been killed, and described him as one of the Guard’s oldest advisers in Syria.
It said he was one of those accompanying the Guards’ elite Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in 2020.
Iran’s ambassador to Damascus, Hossein Akbari, told Iranian state TV that Mousavi was posted as a diplomat at the embassy and was killed by Israeli missiles after returning home from work.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said the killing of Mousavi showed Israel’s weakness.
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“This act is a sign of the Zionist regime’s desperation and weakness in the region, for which it will definitely have to pay a price,” Iranian media quoted Raisi as saying.
The Revolutionary Guards said Israel would suffer for the killing of Mousavi, a brigadier-general-ranked officer in the Guards.
“The aggressive and brutal Zionist regime will have to pay for this crime,” the Guards said in a statement read on state TV.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani told state media that: “Iran reserves the right to take the necessary measures to respond to this action at the appropriate time and place.”
For its part, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group condemned Mousavi’s killing as a “cowardly act”, and said he had played an important role in supporting the resistance in the region as well as the Palestinian people and their interests.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Israel has for years carried out strikes against Iran-linked targets in Syria, where Tehran’s influence has grown since supporting President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war that erupted in Syria in 2011.
Earlier this month, Iran said Israeli strikes killed two Revolutionary Guard members in Syria who worked as military advisers there.
Iran has sent hundreds of Guardsmen as “advisers” to help train and organize thousands of Shiite militia fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to support the government in the Syrian conflict. Lebanese Hezbollah fighters have also worked closely with Iranian military commanders in Syria.
