TEHRAN: Thousands massed on Thursday in the Iranian capital for the funeral of senior Revolutionary Guards commander Razi Moussavi, three days after he was killed in what Tehran says was an Israeli strike.

The crowd in Tehran’s central Imam Hossein square chanted “Death to Israel” and “Death to America”. Many waved yellow flags imprinted with the message “I am your opponent” — a reference to Israel — in both Persian and Hebrew.

Israel has long fought a shadow war of assassinations and sabotage against arch foe Iran and its allies, but Moussavi’s killing in Syria came at a time of sharply heightened regional tensions over the Israeli aggression against Gaza.

Some of the mourners in Tehran carried pictures of Moussavi together with the revered Qasem Soleimani, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s foreign operations arm who was killed in a 2020 US drone strike in Baghdad.

Iran next week will mark the fourth anniversary of the death of Soleimani, who had run the IRGC’s Quds Force for more than a decade. Iranian state media says an Israeli missile strike on Monday near the Syrian

capital Damascus killed Moussavi, a Quds Force general and the most senior Guards commander killed since Soleimani. The Israeli army, which has launched hundreds of strikes on Iran-linked targets in war-torn Syria in recent years, said only that it does not comment on foreign media reports.

Syria on Thursday said Moussavi’s “martyrdom” on its territory was part of Israel’s “aggressive policies”, official news agency SANA reported. In letters sent by the Syrian foreign ministry, Damascus called on the United Nations to act against Israeli actions which might “ignite the region”, SANA said.

Published in Dawn, December 29th, 2023