A new target reached for Israel. The Hebrew state announced this Wednesday that it had killed in an air strike in Lebanon a leader of the armed wing of the Palestinian Fatah, which it accused of having orchestrated attacks in the West Bank.
This is the first time in just over ten months of cross-border firefights between the Lebanese Islamist movement Hezbollah and Israel since the start of the war in Gaza that a Fatah official in Lebanon has been eliminated. Khalil Maqdah was killed in a strike on his vehicle as he was driving near Palestinian camps adjacent to Sidon, the main city in southern Lebanon, according to Fatah and a Lebanese security source.
The Israeli military said one of its planes “hit terrorist Khalil Hussein Khalil Al-Maqdah” in the Sidon region. It accused Maqdah and his brother, Mounir Maqdah, a senior Fatah official in Lebanon, of “acting on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards,” the ideological army of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and of being “involved in organizing terrorist attacks” and “arms trafficking” to the occupied West Bank.
“Throwing oil on the fire”
Fatah’s military wing denounced in a statement the “cowardly assassination” of Khalil Maqdah, who played a “central role” in supporting “the Palestinian people and their resistance” in the ongoing war against Israel in Gaza. The brigades also praised his “major role in supporting the resistance cells” against Israel “for many years in the West Bank.”
This “assassination” is “further proof that Israel wants to set the region ablaze and plunge it into a broad war,” said a member of the Fatah 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, he accused again to AFP.
Following the announcement of Khalil Maqdah’s death, dozens of Fatah fighters gathered in the Ain el-Heloue camp near Saida, firing into the air in anger, according to an AFP correspondent.
Violence flares up in the West Bank
Since the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip on October 7, the day of Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israeli soil, violence has flared up in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 and administered by the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas.
At least 635 Palestinians have been killed there by the Israeli army or settlers, according to an AFP count based on official Palestinian data, and at least 19 Israelis, soldiers or civilians, in Palestinian attacks or during army operations in the Palestinian autonomous zone, according to official Israeli data.
Since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, Lebanese Hezbollah and its allies have claimed responsibility for attacks against Israel from southern Lebanon, in support of Hamas, but Fatah has not announced taking part in the violence. The Israeli army, for its part, has been carrying out raids deep into Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah officials and its Lebanese and Palestinian allies. This violence has left at least 593 dead in Lebanon, mostly Hezbollah fighters but also at least 130 civilians, according to an AFP count. In Israel and on the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, 23 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed, according to Israeli authorities.