More than a thousand people attended the funeral in Beirut on Thursday of the number two of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and two of his companions killed in an attack attributed to Israel, demanding a response, an AFP journalist noted.
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Saleh al-Arouri and six other leaders and executives of that movement were killed on Tuesday evening in this attack against a Hamas office in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the stronghold of the Lebanese Islamist movement Hezbollah.
The coffins of Saleh al-Arouri, Azzam al-Aqraa, a leader of Hamas's military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, and Mohammad al-Raïs, a cadre of the movement, were draped in Palestinian and Hamas flags.
According to an AFP journalist, a machine gun was pointed at each of them during prayers at a mosque in a working-class neighborhood of Beirut.
Under heavy gunfire, the funeral procession then moved towards the Palestinian refugee camp Shatila, where the three men were buried.
Participants chanted “Allah Akbar” (God is the greatest) and waved the green Hamas flag as well as Palestinian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad flags.
“Abu Obeida, bomb Tel Aviv,” they repeated to the spokesman for Hamas’s military branch in Gaza, made famous by the iconic keffiyeh that hides his face at every public appearance.
“The assassination of Saleh al-Arouri or any other Palestinian is a failed maneuver because the resistance will produce new leaders,” Omar Ghannoum, a 35-year-old Palestinian, told AFP.
He came to the funeral “to denounce the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the Israeli army’s violation of Lebanese sovereignty.”
“The enemy has failed”
“The enemy believes that with the assassination of Saleh al-Arouri he can overcome the resistance and impose his conditions,” “but he has failed and will never be able to make Hamas give up its demands, its vision and its strategy.” “Assured Hamas' Qatar-based political leader Ismaïl Haniyeh in a recorded speech broadcast to the crowd.
In Lebanon, several Hamas members are based in exile under the protection of Hezbollah, its ally.
After the Palestinian Islamist movement's unprecedented attack on its territory on October 7, which killed about 1,140 people in Israel, Israel vowed to “destroy” Hamas.
According to Hamas, Israeli retaliation in Gaza has since killed more than 22,000 people.
There have also been almost daily clashes between Hezbollah and its allies and Israel since the war began, but so far they have been limited to southern Lebanon.
Tuesday's strike is the first since October 7 on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital.
Israel, which did not claim it, was immediately targeted by Hamas, Hezbollah and the Lebanese government. An American defense official also suggested on Wednesday that it was indeed an “Israeli attack.”