A prominent general in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard died in an Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Iranian media reported Saturday.

The killing of Gen. Abbas Nilforushan marks the latest casualty suffered by Iran as the nearly yearlong Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Stripteeters on the edge of becoming a regional conflict. His death further ratchets up pressure on Iran to respond, even as Tehran has signaled in recent months that it wants to negotiate with the West over sanctions crushing its economy.

Nilforushan served as the deputy commander for operations in the Guard, a role overseeing its ground forces. What he was doing in Lebanon on Friday wasn’t immediately clear. The Guard’s expeditionary Quds Force for decades has armed, trained and relied on Hezbollah as part of its strategy to rely on regional militias as a counterbalance to Israel and the United States.

  • SoJB@lemmy.ml
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    3 hours ago

    ITT: liberals not giving a shit about terrorism

    But it’s not like y’all have had any coherent beliefs in the first place so not a huge surprise.

    Shoutout to the lib down there going “so what?” To the fact that Israel has killed 200,000 civilians with their terrorism and just committed a 9/11 scale attack.

    But you libs don’t give a fuck. You’re the only non-propagandized people in the world, the US state department would never lie to you.

    • goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 hours ago

      They love to cheer when the right people are killed and ignore the innocents who either also died or will get killed in the escalation

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Wow, so weird that Iranian officials somehow keep getting killed in these targeted attacks against people coordinating terrorist attacks.

    • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      Hezbollah is as much a terrorist organization as the Asov battalion is.

      That is to say, you may not like their politics, but they’re resistance groups formed to fight against an occupation.

      To that end, Iran is their sponsor, so of course their is coordination between the two, especially at the highest levels.

      The irony, is that you’re saying this not even two weeks after thousands of consumer electronics were turned into bombs, and detonated inside Lebanon, and then multiple residential buildings flattened via airstrikes, both actions taken by the Israelis.

      I guess to you, any civilians killed in those instances were just collateral damage, and definitely not victims of terrorism.

      • leisesprecher@feddit.org
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        8 hours ago

        Wow, whataboutism and unfounded ad hominem in a single argument.

        Bold strategy, let’s see if it pays off!

        • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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          7 hours ago

          Some people just aren’t worth engaging with. They get their entire world view from rich “leftist” tankies on twitch and think the israel vs everyone else in the middle east conflict started last fall.

          I mean… pretending nobody had any issues with azov (the ultranationalist movement that would likely have attacked ukraine if russia didn’t beat them to it…) is a giant red flag in and of itself.

          • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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            5 hours ago

            I did not endorse Azov, or attribute any sense of morality to them.

            They were an apt analogy to Hezbollah e.g. militant resistant groups, but not terrorists.

            The fact that you all actually believe Hezbollah is akin to Al-Qaeda or ISIS is the real insanity here.

            But I get it, you’ve been told that your entire life from mainstream Western outlets, and it’s a hard to leave that propaganda bubble entirely.

            I did enjoy how you dismissed me as some “tankie” and Twitch viewer…? Given that I don’t use Twitch, am not a tankie, and have an academic background in related fields that give me at least a slightly above average insight and perspective into this subject.

            • Doom
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              5 hours ago

              But you don’t consume propaganda, your propaganda sources are correct!

              /s

              • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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                5 hours ago

                What sources?

                Do I have to cite the Bill of Rights every time I mention the second amendment?

                Water is wet, the Earth is round, and Hezbollah was formed in response to Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

                More accurately, it was a consolidation of various militant Shia factions and groups.

                In case you’re unaware, modern Islamic terrorism is almost exclusively a Sunni phenomenon, or more accurately, more fundamental offshoots and subsets of Sunni Islam e.g. Wahhabism.

                But sure, that’s just my recollection of past readings and I’m not going to go find the books I read to provide a bibliography.

                If I got anything grossly wrong in there, please call me out and show everyone how misinformed I really am.

                • Doom
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                  4 hours ago

                  Wow everything I already know condescending delivered by a complete asshole! How nice!

                  Get off the high horse

        • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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          8 hours ago

          That’s not even close to whataboutism…I explicitly stated that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization, unlike the IDF and Israeli security state.

          Next time maybe ask ChatGPT before burping out the first thought that pops in your head, it might save you from future embarrassment.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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    13 hours ago

    I mean… fuck around and find out?

    When you are working for a regime that bankrolls terror attacks to destabilize a political rival you gotta kind of expect said political rival to fire back.

    Would be really nice if israel could focus more on the military/strategic targets and less on the genocide and semi-stochastic terror but…

    • small44@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Does that mean assassinating natanyaho would also be justifiable for all the crimes and terror he did?

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      12 hours ago

      I mean… fuck around and find out?

      If you mean Hezbollah, sure.

      The IRGC guy who was working with Hezbollah here is gonna be Iranian intelligence, though, and I doubt that Israel specifically is going after the IRGC. I mean, Iran’s ultimately involved in all this, sure, but aside from some missiles that we and Israel mostly shot down, it has mostly acted against Israel via proxies. Like, if Israel wanted to nail the IRGC, they’d probably have hit stuff in Iran.

      I don’t think that Israel’s likely to initiate against Iran directly, though I did just read some news discussing whether Iran might initiate direct hostilities against Israel, and then we might go after Iran, which I think is probably a more-likely route for the IRGC getting hit than Israel specifically acting against Iran directly.

      digs up page

      https://apnews.com/article/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-war-pagers-920ced5349562163eeb96d6a5a768e89

      Hezbollah, however, is Iran’s chief ally and proxy group, and Tehran may have to respond to retain its credibility with its partners in the axis.

      “Iran is very much in a policy dilemma right now,” said Firas Maksad, of the Middle East Institute. On one hand, clearly it very much has wanted to avoid an all-out and direct confrontation, given its long-standing preference for asymmetric warfare and using proxies.

      “But on the other hand, a lack of a worthy response given the magnitude of the event will only encourage Israel to push deeper past Iran’s red lines,” he said. Not responding also sends a signal of weakness to its regional proxies.

      Any direct Iranian involvement risks dragging Israel’s chief ally, the U.S., into the war, just over a month before the U.S. elections and at a time Iran has signaled its interest in renewing negotiations with the U.S. over its nuclear program.

      EDIT: And I’m skeptical that Iran’s going to get directly involved here. The Iranian government issued a statement, and it wasn’t “we’re going to clean Israel’s clock”, but just generally urging Muslims in the area (not, like, Iranian Muslims) to fight Israel, and explicitly put Hezbollah at the forefront. So I suppose they probably aren’t looking for a direct conflict with Israel:

      https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-khamenei-calls-muslims-confront-israel-after-nasrallah-killing

      Israeli “criminals must know that they are far too small to cause any significant damage on the strongholds of Hezbollah in Lebanon,” Khamenei said, adding: “All the resistance forces in the region support and stand alongside Hezbollah.”

      He also urged Muslims to stand alongside the people of Lebanon and Hezbollah and support them in “confronting the usurping and wicked regime.”

      “The fate of this region will be determined by the forces of resistance, with Hezbollah at the forefront,” he added.

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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        12 hours ago

        Its about gradual escalation.

        israel has made it clear they are now going against the terrorist leaders and backers (rather than just the foot soldiers and their families…). They have also made it abundantly clear that they don’t care who is around those terrorists. That is horrible (blowing up pagers in a grocery store) and “effective” (murdering anyone who meets with them).

        If iran continues to play proxy war games? Then those strikes will move into iranian territory in the same way they strikes moved into lebanese territory.