Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert confirmed on Saturday for the first time that Israel was responsible for the death of Hezbollah’s global operations chief, Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in a car bomb explosion in Damascus in 2008.
In an interview with Channel 13 News, Olmert was quoted by the Times of Israel saying, “We haven’t talked about this until now, but I believe we can finally admit it. After eliminating the entire Hezbollah leadership, we can acknowledge that 16 years ago, we took out the greatest, most abominable, most contemptible mass murderer they ever had, the one who built the entire military wing of Hezbollah.”
He added, “What exploded was the car’s bumper that we placed there so that when Mughniyeh passed by, we could push the button and detonate it.”
His revelations came just two days after the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah by Israel.
“These operations are very important. They always have an aspect that generates excitement… but they generally don’t change the reality,” he noted, emphasizing that they “can create a resonance that may generate a kind of momentum, but let’s not overdo it.”
Mughniyeh was involved in several Hezbollah attacks, including the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in the Argentine capital, which killed 85 people.
He was also implicated in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut and in the 1994 assassination of the CIA chief in Lebanon, William F. Buckley. In the years following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Mughniyeh was responsible for arming and training Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq, which carried out deadly attacks against US troops.
According to several international media outlets, the Israeli operation was conducted in collaboration with the CIA, a fact that the United States has never acknowledged.
