Iranian commander claims Israel tried to assassinate him

The U.S. has given Israel a green light to assassinate Soleimani, says report.

By World Israel News Staff

Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has said in an interview with Iranian state TV that Israel tried to assassinate him during the 2006 Lebanon war.

Soleimani said that he spent the entire length of the war in Lebanon to advise Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. One night, Israeli drones were swarming the command center where he and Nasrallah were positioned, Soleimani recalled. He decided that they needed to evacuate to a second building and moments later the IDF dropped two bombs nearby, Soleimani added in the TV interview.

“We were feeling that these two bombings were about to be followed by a third one,  so we decided to get out of that building. We didn’t have a car, and there was complete silence, just the Israeli regime aircraft flying over Dahiyeh,” he said.

Soleimani added that he had to avoid Israeli tracking sensors to get Nasrallah to safety and after doing so he returned back to the command center.

This isn’t the only time that the accusation has been made that Israel is trying to assassinate the IRGC commander.

Hojjatoleslam Hossein Ta’eb, the chief of IRGC intelligence, said on September 26 that three unnamed people had been arrested in connection with an attempt on Soleimani’s life, the Iranian Tasnim news agency reported.

According to Ta’eb, the “Israel-Arab plot” was foiled during Fatimiyya (the days when Shiite Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Fatimah al-Zahra, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad).  The assassins planned to dig a tunnel under the building where Soleimani was expected to partake in the mourning services and blow it up with between 350 and 500 kilograms of explosive material,” he said.

According to a report by the Kuwaiti Al-Jarida news agency last year, the U.S. has given Israel a green light to assassinate Soleimani.

The report cited an unnamed source as saying that “there is an American-Israeli agreement that Soleimani is a threat to the two countries’ interests in the region.”