The commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps puts the Israeli regime's recent assassination of a senior IRGC advisor in Syria down to the regime's failure in its ongoing war against the Gaza Strip.
"You assassinate Martyr [Brigadier General] Seyyed Razi Mousavi because you could not achieve anything in the Gaza battleground," Brigadier General Ismail Qa'ani said on Friday, addressing the Israeli regime.
Mousavi, a senior IRGC commander, was martyred in a missile attack by the regime against the Sayyeda Zeinab neighborhood of the Syrian capital Damascus on Monday. He was martyred while serving as part of Iran's military advisory mission in the Arab country.
The atrocity came amid a war that the occupying regime has been waging against Gaza since October 7 following an operation staged by the Palestinian territory's resistance movements, dubbed Operation al-Aqsa Storm. Qa'ani considered al-Aqsa Storm to be a response to "the extensive atrocities that the Zionist regime had committed against the Muslim people of Palestine."
At least 21,320 people, mostly women and children, have been killed during the Israeli military campaign across the coastal sliver.
Tel Aviv, however, has stopped short of realizing any of its stated goals, including obliteration of the Gaza-based resistance movement of Hamas, enabling release of the people who were taken captive during al-Aqsa Storm, and prompting forced displacement of Gaza's population to neighboring countries.
Qa'ani likewise noted that the Israeli regime and the United States -- Tel Aviv's most dedicated ally, which has thrown all-out military and political support behind the war -- had achieved nothing throughout the aggression other than killing innocent women and children.
He noted the US had been investing all of its power in supporting the Zionists, but said Washington would eventually be held accountable over its crimes.
As opposed to the Zionist regime, which has been receiving maximal Western support, the people of Gaza have solely been defended by the regional resistance front, Qa'ani, meanwhile, reminded.
'Israel hides true number of its casualties'
The Iranian commander said the Zionist regime had, so far during the war on Gaza, incurred a sizeable number of casualties, including thousands of fatalities and as many as 500 cases of blindness.
"They, however, are not man enough to announce the number of their casualties," Qa'ani said.