Israel announces killing of Fatah commander in Lebanon accused of “terrorist attacks”

Israel announced on Wednesday, August 21, that it had killed in an airstrike a leader of the armed wing of the Palestinian Fatah movement, which it accused of having orchestrated attacks in the West Bank. The Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a rival of Hamas in power in the Gaza Strip, considered that Israel was seeking to “set the region ablaze”.

This is the first time in just over ten months of cross-border firefights between the Lebanese Islamist movement Hezbollah and Israel that a Fatah official in Lebanon has been killed. Khalil al-Maqdah was killed in a strike on his vehicle as he was driving near Palestinian camps bordering Sidon, the main city in southern Lebanon, according to Fatah and a Lebanese security source.

The Israeli military said one of its planes “had hit the terrorist Khalil Hussein Khalil al-Maqdah” in the Saida region. She accused Maqdah and his brother, Mounir Maqdah, a senior Fatah official in Lebanon, “to act on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards”the ideological army of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and to be “involved in organizing terrorist attacks” and the “arms trafficking” towards the occupied West Bank.

The military wing of Fatah denounced in a statement the “cowardly assassination” by Khalil al-Maqdah, who played a “central role” by supporting “the Palestinian people and their resistance” in the ongoing war against Israel in Gaza. The brigades also welcomed his “major role in supporting resistance cells” against Israel “for many years in the West Bank”.

This “assassination” East “further proof that Israel wants to set the region ablaze and plunge it into a large war”said a member of Fatah’s Central Committee in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank. “The occupation forces are using Palestinian blood (…) to add fuel to the fire of war” in the Gaza Strip, Toufiq Tirawy again accused AFP.