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The killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan by Israel in Lebanon “will not go unanswered,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on September 29.
Nilforoushan, deputy commander of IRGC operations, was killed on September 27 in as a result of an Israeli strike on the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, that targeted Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary-General of Hezbollah.
The United States sanctioned Nilforoushan in 2022 and said he was “directly in charge of protest suppression” amid demonstrations in Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest for allegedly not wearing her headscarf.
Nilforoushan also served in Syria, backing Syrian government forces against militants seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
In 2020, Iranian state television called Nilforoushan a “comrade” of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC expeditionary Quds Force who was killed in a U.S. drone attack in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, that year.
A report released by the New York Times on September 29 said that there are divisions within Iran’s government over how to respond to Israel’s killing of Nasrallah and Nilforoushan.
Conservatives with the government want Tehran to respond to the killing with a strike that would deter Israel from potentially hitting Iran, while new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian argued that doing so would mean they would be falling into a trap laid by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to widen the war.
Citing four unnamed Iranian officials who allegedly knew Nasrallah, the newspaper reported that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “had been deeply shaken by his friend’s death and was in mourning, but had assumed a calm and pragmatic posture.”
The report noted that Khamenei appeared to signal that a response to the assassination may come from Hezbollah rather than directly from Iran.
It’s worth noting that Iran had refrained from responding after Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian Hamas Movement, was killed in Tehran last July. Israeli intelligence was reportedly behind the assassination.
A direct Iranian strike against Israel, similar to the one that was carried out last April after the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Syria, could indeed open the door for Netanyahu to expand the war from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon to Iran with help from the U.S.
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