BICOM

Lebanese intelligence agencies have identified four suspects in an attack against senior Hamas operative Mohammad Hamdan earlier this month, claiming two of them are Israeli agents.

The al-Akhbar newspaper said that the group flew out of Lebanon to different destinations. The two alleged Israeli agents are a man with duel Swedish-Iraqi citizenship and a woman who is a Georgian national. The other two members of the group were Lebanese nationals and fled to Turkey. One of them, Ahmed Betiah, was arrested and extradited to Lebanon, while the other managed to flee Turkey to Romania.

The al-Akhbar report added that Hamdan was being tracked by Israeli intelligence for the past seven months. The attempted assassination took place on 14 January in the Lebanese port city of Sidon. The attack left Hamdan wounded after the “explosion of a bomb placed under a BMW car,” a military source told AFP.

At the time, Lebanese news outlet Al Mayadeen, which is affiliated with Hezbollah and Hamas’s political office in Lebanon, suggested Israel may have been involved in the bombing, with Hezbollah leader Hasssan Nasrallah accusing Israel. This was denied by Intelligence Minister Israel Katz, who said: “If we’d been involved, this wouldn’t have ended with him lightly wounded.”

In related news, Hezbollah MP Mohammad Raad responded to an article by IDF spokesperson Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, in which he accused Lebanese officials of allowing Iran to turn the country into “one big missile factory”.

Writing in Al-Hewar Al-Motamaden, one of the Lebanese blog sites Manelis published in, Raad called such claims “provocative nonsense issued only by a coward”. He added that “Israel should not be unmindful and engage itself in a war that would destroy it… Hezbollah has become today stronger and has what it takes to destroy the Israeli army. Israel has become isolated internationally and regionally. Its media spins are a cover for its inability to show itself as strong”. Raad concluded: “The authority of the Zionist entity, try as it may, will not be able to convince the Arab and Islamic peoples to give up the idea of resisting the Zionist occupation. The day will come when the Hezbollah flag will be raised over Jerusalem and the Palestinians will regain their occupied land.”