Muhammad Jafar Katzir, head of the arms-smuggling unit whose warehouses have been bombed by the IDF, is brother-in-law to the Hezbollah chief’s daughter.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
The IDF attack near Damascus International Airport Friday was directed against sites belonging to a unit of Hezbollah headed by a relative of Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah, Hebrew-language Ynet reported Monday.
The Dubai Al Arabiya TV channel reported Sunday that the strike had been aimed at Hezbollah’s Unit 4400, whose leader it named as Haj Fadi. Tal Beeri, head of the Research Department of the Alma Research and Education Center that specializes in the security situation on Israel’s northern border, told Ynet that Fadi’s real name was Muhammad Jafar Katzir.
“One of his brothers is married to the daughter of Hassan Nasrallah,” he said, “and another brother is considered ‘Hezbollah’s first martyr.’ He was the one who blew up a car bomb in the first Tyre [Lebanon] tragedy in 1982.”
Nasrallah has suffered the loss of only one of his five children in his battles with Israel. In 1997, his oldest son, who was 18 at the time, was killed in an Israeli ambush of four Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon.
Beeri said that Unit 4400 is responsible for transferring weaponry from Iran to Lebanon via Syria through both land and air corridors.
“This unit works in full cooperation with Unit 190 in the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards,” he noted. Both units “have storage sites on Syrian soil as part of the logistical operation” of the corridors.
According to Al Arabiya, “The dangerous materials that the unit smuggles from Syria to Lebanon are smuggled under the guise of ‘humanitarian equipment.'”
Their activities have not gone unnoticed by the IDF, the report said, noting that “over the past few years, Israel has attacked Unit 4400’s targets on Syrian soil several times.”
According to a Sunday report by the Britain-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (SOHR), Israel’s alleged strike targeted a site in a military airport used to construct Iranian UAVs, which are sent in disassembled parts to Syria from the Islamic Republic.
Residents in the capital said they heard at least three explosions, and SOHR stated that the facility was destroyed, while one runway and a radar system were damaged.
The Syrian media only said that several Israeli missiles were fired toward some military positions near and in Damascus, causing only some material losses. It claimed that Syrian air defenses had shot down most of the missiles.
Israeli officials went on record over the weekend to state that the IDF has managed to destroy 90 percent of Iran’s military operations in Syria, including weapons factories and arms smuggling attempts, in what is deemed a “war between the wars.”