Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said Sunday one of its commanders had been shot dead in Syria in an assassination it blamed on Israeli agents.
The Iran-backed group said Ali Ramzi al-Aswad, 31, was killed Sunday morning “by agents of the Zionist (Israeli) enemy” in the countryside outside the Syrian capital Damascus.
“The assassination was carried out by direct shooting near his house,” an Islamic Jihad official, who asked not to be named, told AFP.
Aswad, a Palestinian refugee living in a Syrian camp and also known as Abu Abed al-Rahman, was a member of the group’s Al-Quds Brigade armed wing, it said.
Many of the Gaza-based group’s senior leaders have been living in Damascus, and the killing is the latest reported targeting of the group by Israel.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group, which fights alongside Syrian government forces, condemned the attack in a statement late Sunday, saying “this heinous crime… bears the hallmarks of the Zionist enemy.”
Since civil war erupted in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in the neighboring country, targeting government troops as well as Iran-backed forces and Hezbollah fighters.
The Israeli military rarely comments on individual strikes against Syria but has vowed repeatedly to keep up its air campaign to stop arch-foe Iran from consolidating its presence.
Last week, Israeli airstrikes targeting a weapons depot in Syria killed an army officer and two pro-Iran fighters, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.
