Iran says killing of IRGC officer in Beirut strike targeting Nasrallah ‘will not go unanswered’

Israel’s killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Deputy Commander Abbas Nilforoushan in Lebanon “will not go unanswered,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says in a statement.

Nilforoushan, deputy commander of IRGC operations, was killed Friday in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut that targeted Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Tehran-backed Hezbollah terror group.

The New York Times reported earlier that the Iranian leadership is divided on how to respond to the strike.

The US 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 to the liking of police.

Nilforoushan also served in Syria, backing Syrian President Bashar Assad in the country’s devastating years-long civil war that grew out of the 2011 Arab Spring.

In 2020, Iranian state television called him a “comrade” of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of its expeditionary Quds Force who was killed in a US drone attack in Baghdad that year.