The Israeli army said it targeted in an airstrike in Lebanon on Wednesday Khalil al-Maqdah, a commander in the armed wing of the Palestinian Fatah movement, describing him as having worked for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
“Earlier today... an air force aircraft targeted Khalil al-Maqdah in the Sidon area of southern Lebanon," the army said in a statement, which also claimed that Maqdah and his brother worked for Iran in "directing attacks and transferring funds and weapons to terrorist infrastructure" in the occupied West Bank, AFP reported.
In response, Fatah accused Israel of seeking to “ignite a regional war.”
Al-Maqdah was killed in a strike on his car in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, according to Fatah and a Lebanese security source.
The Israeli military said al-Maqdah was the brother of Mounir al-Maqdah, who heads the Lebanese branch of Fatah’s armed wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and accused them both of “directing terror attacks and smuggling weapons” to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The attack marks the first such reported attack on a senior member of Fatah, the movement led by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, in more than 10 months of cross-border clashes between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement following the Gaza war.
Fatah said al-Maqdah had been killed “in a cowardly assassination carried out by ... Zionist (Israeli) warplanes on Sidon,” describing him as “one of the leaders” of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Lebanon, the movement’s armed wing.
In a statement, it said al-Maqdah had “a central role” in “supporting the Palestinian people and its resistance” during the Gaza war and an “important role in supporting resistance cells” for years in the West Bank.
A senior Fatah official in the West Bank city of Ramallah accused Israel of killing him in order to spark a regional war.
The “assassination of a Fatah official is further proof that Israel wants to ignite a full-scale war in the region,” Tawfiq Tirawy, a member of Fatah’s central committee, told AFP in Ramallah.
A Lebanese security source and Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported the same information.
An AFP correspondent at the site of the attack said a car was struck near the Palestinian refugee camps of Ain al-Helweh and Mieh Mieh, adding that rescuers had pulled a body from the charred vehicle.
Dozens of angry Fatah supporters gathered inside the Ain al-Helweh camp, the AFP correspondent said, adding gunshots were fired in the air.
