U.S. President Donald Trump supports Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist threats, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday following the killing of Hezbollah’s second-in-command.
Asked by Israel’s Walla news site whether Trump supported the assassination of Haytham Ali Tabatabai, the Iranian-backed terror group’s “chief of staff,” Leavitt said she had not spoken directly to the president about the strike.
“But of course, the president supports Israel’s right to defend itself and to take out terrorist threats in the region,” she added.
The operation against the senior terrorist—dubbed “Black Friday”—was the first Israeli strike in Beirut since July and came nearly a year to the day after a ceasefire took effect.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday noted that Tabatabai was a “mass murderer” whose hands were “soaked in the blood of many Israelis and Americans, and it is not for nothing that the U.S. put a bounty of five million dollars on his head.”
He warned that Jerusalem expects the Lebanese government to uphold its commitment to disarm Hezbollah under the U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal.
Washington had offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Ali Tabatabai’s capture, after designating him a global terrorist in October 2016 for overseeing Hezbollah’s operations in Syria and Yemen.
