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A senior member of the Palestinian group Fatah was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon Wednesday, prompting the movement to accuse Tel Aviv of trying to start a regional war.
Fatah, the Palestinian movement based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said Khalil Maqdah was killed in a strike near the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.
The Israeli military claimed it targeted the brother of Mounir Maqdah, who heads the Lebanese branch of Fatah’s armed wing.
It accused them both of “directing attacks and smuggling weapons” to the West Bank and collaborating with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
In response, the Fatah movement, which is headed by Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas and rivals the Gaza Strip’s rulers Hamas, accused Israel of bidding to trigger a wider regional war.
Maqdah’s killing marks the first such attack on a senior Fatah member in more than 10 months of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and cross-border clashes between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The “assassination of a Fatah official is further proof that Israel wants to ignite a full-scale war in the region,” Tawfiq Tirawy, a member of Fatah’s central committee, told AFP in Ramallah.
It came only hours after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken left empty-handed after a tour of the Middle East aimed at reaching a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
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