Itongadol.- Lebanon\’s militant Shi\’ite group Hezbollah said on Wednesday one of its commanders was killed outside his Beirut home overnight in an attack it blamed on Israel.
The group said in a statement that Hassan al-Laqqis, "who served the resistance his entire life," was killed at around midnight in the southern Hadath district of the Lebanese capital.
Al-Laqqis was on his way home when he was killed, the official Hezbollah television station Al-Manar said. It gave no detail of the operation but said "the accusation is directed at the enemy, Israel.”
Hezbollah described Laqqis, who will be buried in the Bekaa Valley town of Baalbek later in the day, as "one of the leaders of the Islamic resistance" against Israel who had been frequently targeted by the Jewish state.
He had been with Hezbollah since its first days in the 1980s, when it was set up with Iranian support to fight Israeli troops occupying south Lebanon, and his son was killed in the 2006 war, Hezbollah said in a statement.
"The Israeli enemy tried to get to our martyr brother several times, in more than one location, but these attempts failed until this repugnant assassination," it said.
Israel would "bear full responsibility and all the consequences for this heinous crime", it said.