A prominent general in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard died in an Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Iranian media reported Saturday.

The killing of Gen. Abbas Nilforushan marks the latest casualty suffered by Iran as the nearly yearlong Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Stripteeters on the edge of becoming a regional conflict. His death further ratchets up pressure on Iran to respond, even as Tehran has signaled in recent months that it wants to negotiate with the West over sanctions crushing its economy.

Nilforushan served as the deputy commander for operations in the Guard, a role overseeing its ground forces. What he was doing in Lebanon on Friday wasn’t immediately clear. The Guard’s expeditionary Quds Force for decades has armed, trained and relied on Hezbollah as part of its strategy to rely on regional militias as a counterbalance to Israel and the United States.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Wow, so weird that Iranian officials somehow keep getting killed in these targeted attacks against people coordinating terrorist attacks.

    • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      Hezbollah is as much a terrorist organization as the Asov battalion is.

      That is to say, you may not like their politics, but they’re resistance groups formed to fight against an occupation.

      To that end, Iran is their sponsor, so of course their is coordination between the two, especially at the highest levels.

      The irony, is that you’re saying this not even two weeks after thousands of consumer electronics were turned into bombs, and detonated inside Lebanon, and then multiple residential buildings flattened via airstrikes, both actions taken by the Israelis.

      I guess to you, any civilians killed in those instances were just collateral damage, and definitely not victims of terrorism.

      • BMTea@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        “Terrorist” is the worst defined, most expansive and arbitrary applied legal term. It essentially means “non-state actor hostile to us or our friends.”