A Hezbollah commander, who was convicted for the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic
Hariri, was killed in an Israeli strike, Saudi Arabia's Al-Arabiya network reported on Sunday. Salim Jamil Ayyash was reportedly killed in an Israeli strike on al-Qusayr, in Syria’s Homs region on Saturday.
Ayyash, 61, born in the village of Harouf in southern Lebanon, holds American citizenship. The U.S. had offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on his whereabouts. He was a member of Hezbollah's Unit 121, the terror group’s “assassinations unit,” which took orders directly from Hezbollah’s slain leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The U.S. Department of State said in a statement that Ayyash had also been involved in efforts to harm U.S. military personnel.
A strike on Damascus attributed to Israel on Sunday
On Dec. 11, 2020, the international tribunal established to rule on Hariri's assassination sentenced Ayyash in absentia to five life terms on terrorism charges connected to a February 2005 truck bomb attack in Beirut that killed Hariri along with 21 others, and injured 226 people.
The court found that Ayyash led the hit squad behind the bombing and was actively involved in Hariri’s assassination.
In June 2022, the U.N. Special Tribunal for Lebanon also sentenced two other Hezbollah operatives, Hassan Habib Merhi and Hussein Hassan Oneissi, to life in prison for Hariri’s assassination. The two were convicted in absentia by the tribunal in The Hague.
Hezbollah then announced it would not surrender the two, just as it had refused to hand over Ayyash. The court found that Merhi and Oneissi had circulated a video clip in which a fictitious group claimed responsibility for Hariri’s killing, intending to shield Hezbollah’s operatives who had carried out the attack.
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