The armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad announced the death of its official yesterday Sunday near his residence in a suburb of Damascus, during an operation by Israeli “agents”, with a press release distributed to the media.

“The Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement and its armed wing, the Al-Quds Brigades (…) mourn Ali Ramzi al-Aswad, (also known as) Abu Abd al-Rahman, 31,” a refugee in a Palestinian camp in Syria who joined the Al Quds Brigades very early, according to the statement.

He was killed yesterday Sunday morning by “agents of the Zionist enemy”, continues the text, which denounces this “cowardly crime”.

“The assassination was carried out by direct fire near his house,” in the Qudshiyya district, a suburb of Damascus, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

He will be buried today in the cemetery of the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, near Damascus, he added.

In November 2019, two people, including the son of one of the leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Akram al-Azuri, were killed in an Israeli bomb attack in Damascus, according to official Syrian media and the Palestinian radical group, several of whose leaders have base in the Syrian capital.

On February 19, 15 people were killed in an Israeli strike in Damascus, targeting a neighborhood where security services have facilities, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It was the deadliest Israeli raid on the Syrian capital since the war in Syria began, according to the same NGO.

Since war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israel has launched hundreds of strikes there, the vast majority of them from the air, against positions of the Syrian armed forces and their allies, Iranian and pro-Iranian armed groups, especially Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that “dozens of terrorists” had been killed by Israeli forces in the past month. “We will find the terrorists and the architects of terrorism wherever they are,” he added, without specifically referring to the death of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad chief.