Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Tuesday condemned the alleged Israeli strike that killed a top Quds Force commander in Damascus on Monday, warning the “cowardly crime will not go unanswered.”
“After repeated defeats and failures against the faith and will of the Resistance Front fighters, the Zionist regime has put blind assassinations on its agenda in the struggle to save itself,” said Raisi, according to Agence France-Presse.
The United Nations Security Council was set to meet on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the strike, which targeted a building adjacent to the Iranian embassy and killed seven members of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including Brig. Gen. Mohammad Zahedi, a top commander responsible for Syria and Lebanon.
The former chief of the IRGC’s terrorist ground forces, Zahedi had been sanctioned by the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Monday publicly blamed the strike on the “Zionist regime” and vowed the Islamic Republic would respond “at the appropriate time and place.”