Former Intel Head: ‘Israel Not Always Responsible for Terrorist Eliminations’

Former Director of the National Security Council General Yaakov Amidror said that the elimination of Hizbullah commander Mustafa Badreddine was “good news” for Israel – but that Israel was not necessarily the party behind the action. “We are not always responsibility for these kinds of things,” Amidror told Army Radio Friday morning. “We don’t know who is responsible for this. There are a lot of parties at war with each other in Syria, without Israel’s involvement. But the more these experienced terrorists are eliminated from the list of our most wanted, the better.”

Hizbullah said it would investigate the elimination of Badreddine, who was involved in terror acts around the world. He was prosecuted for the 1983 truck bombings of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait City, and was involved in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut that killed 241 people. He was later tried for the attempted murder of the Emir of Kuwait, escaping to Iraq before he could be executed.

Badreddine was also accused of being the main organizer of the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and of organizing numerous Hizbullah attacks against Israel. He was also designated a “global terrorist” by the U.S. During the Syrian civil war, he has been leading Hizbullah forces fighting on behalf of Bashar al-Assad in the area of al-Qusair, sources said.

Badreddine was killed in an air strike in Syria Tuesday, and media reports in Lebanon and Syria immediately attributed his death to Israel. However, the terror group has rolled back that assessment, and sources in Hizbullah quoted in Haaretz Friday said it was more likely he was killed in a strike by a Syrian rebel group. Hizbullah said it would conduct “a full investigation” into the strike. Israel was not mentioned in an official Hizbullah statement on the matter.