New details emerged on yesterday's shooting incident on the Syrian-Lebanese border: "The Israeli target for assassination yesterday at Jadidat Yabus was the son of Imad Mughniyah, Mustafa," reports the Al-Arabiya network this morning. An Israeli aircraft reportedly fired a missile that missed the jeep in which Mustafa Mughniyah was traveling, allowing him to escape another missile that was launched about half a minute later.
Imad Mughniyah was involved in the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marine and French peacekeeping barracks in Beirut that killed over 350 people, as well as the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s.
It is reported that the other passengers in the vehicle also survived. With Mughniyah traveled Iranian officer in Revolutionary Guards Imad Karimi. Mustafa Mughniyah is in continuous contact with the Revolutionary Guards as a whole and its Quds Force in particular, as he is the commander of Hezbollah's 112 Unit, whose mission is to get advanced weapons from Iran to Syria, and to transfer it from Syria to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon.
According to a report in al-Quds al-Arabi, an Israeli drone struck a Hezbollah jeep that transported four troops to Syria. The newspaper learned from news sources that the Israeli aircraft that shelled the vehicle near the Syria-Lebanon border aimed both missiles at a Hezbollah military commander known as Hajj Amad. According to the report, the first missile missed the target and did not hit the vehicle. The second missile hit the vehicle directly only after the commander got out and moved a few feet away.
Al-Quds al-Arabi said that Hajj Amad had previously taken part in leading the campaign alongside the Assad army against Syrian rebels in recent times in the al-Qalmon Mountains, on the border between Lebanon and Syria. A source close to Hezbollah told AFP that no fatalities had been claimed in the attack. The source added that after the passengers left, the vehicle was bombed directly by the second missile. The source also said there were no casualties in the incident.
The Lebanese Foreign Ministry said in response to the incident: "We condemn the Israeli attack on a Lebanese vehicle in Jadidat Yabus, a Syrian city near the border with us."