Lebanon is set to lodge a complaint against Israel at the United Nations Security Council after the assassination of the deputy head of the political bureau of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement in a drone strike on the southern suburb of the country’s capital city of Beirut.
Following the Tuesday assassination, Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati contacted Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and ordered an urgent complaint to the 15-member council due to the violation of the country’s sovereignty by Israel.
“The strike is an Israeli crime that clearly aims to bring Lebanon into a new phase of confrontations after the ongoing daily attacks in the south,” Mikati said.
He said that the strike showed that Israel was resorting to exporting its failures in Gaza, adding it had a clear implication for Lebanon in confounding “efforts to remove the specter of war from the country.”
Arouri was killed on Tuesday in a “treacherous Zionist strike” on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh, Hamas announced on its official channel.
Hamas politburo member Izzat al-Rishq called it a “cowardly assassination.”
Arouri was a senior official in Hamas’s politburo and was known to be deeply involved in its military affairs. He had previously headed the group’s presence in the occupied West Bank.
Hamas vows crushing response
Meanwhile, Hamas has vowed to deliver a crushing response to Israel over the the assassination of its senior official Saleh al-Arouri in a drone strike on southern Beirut.
“The crime of assassinating Arouri will be met with an appropriate response from the Palestinian people and resistance factions. All scenarios are open in the aftermath of the murder,” Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon and also a member of the group’s politburo, stated early on Wednesday.
He also criticized the “hypocritical” reactions of some international institutions to the targeted killing.
“We call upon Western countries to take effective measures aimed at stopping the [Zionist] occupiers’ crimes against the Palestinian nation,” Hamdan said.
The senior Hamas official also lashed out at the United States for providing the Israeli regime a cover to forge ahead with its bloody onslaught in the Gaza Strip, emphasizing that Arouri’s assassination falls within such backing.
“Washington’s allegation that it knew nothing about Arouri’s assassination is simply an attempt to escape from political responsibility,” Hamdan added.
