Who was the Palestinian resistance leader assassinated in Beirut? Jon Elmer explains

yeah Salah harri uh was assassinated yesterday in the dahia in this in the uh you know what they call the Hezbollah stronghold the hasala neighborhood um in Beirut uh in a meeting with apparently uh top Kasam commanders um in Lebanon um and it's a significant blow there's no question about it uh he was a serious um uh serious leader you know his family was interviewed yesterday and they said um you know that he he's not any more important than any child that was killed in Gaza and that he's a part of the struggle in the same trench as their people and um you know that's true in a sense but in another sense he's for sure an important leader he was a founding member of the Kasam brigades the armed Wing uh of Hamas um he spent most of his life in prison um as a lot of the leaders do either uh impr prison or assassinated and that's um part of the cost of uh being in the resistance program um and when he was in prison um he really built the foundations of the cassam Bri Gades um which in many ways a key pillar of the movement was in the prisons of course um because the Israelis arrest these guys like in the first inada they arrested um uh people like sahah aruri or Yahya sinir before they even really knew um what role the cassam Bri Gades um were playing in the inata and the cells that they had organized um arui is from the West Bank U the southern West Bank Town of of Hebron which is a cassan BRI Gades and Hamas um I I don't want to use the word stronghold but I I guess that's the term that the media has been pushing on us over the last couple days so it's stuck in my head but um significant um you know roots of the movement in the Hebron area um and he spent a critical period of his life in prison which is one of the reason why he wasn't assassinated it's because he was in prison for um he spent two decades um in prison and so it's it's important to note that um you know that that that kind of a leader it it it's difficult to replace he has a lot of institutional knowledge um he has very senior connections with the other um um you know with the important resistance AIS um regimes in Iran um and of course with nasala and Hezbollah in in Lebanon after aruri was deported in the OTS um so he was an important overseas Commander uh of the cassam brigades and he's you know his institutional knowledge as I said it's very difficult to replace but at the same time we know that these assassinations don't um destroy the movement they don't decapitate the movement um and I think a lot of the reasons why uh Israel's taking a pot shot and breaking the rules in the um you know in the northern front and attacking deep inside of Lebanon um in Beirut is at a meeting um is because they can't reach any leadership in Gaza they haven't been able to pull any kind of military success out of what's happening in Gaza the massacres and now we're seeing that Israel's um starting to draw down its fight and so they need to have um some kind of symbols of Victory and they they promised that they would um you know reach the leadership wherever they were and so I think that's what they're attempting to do they're hitting um you know essentially a soft target they hit an apartment building uh in the dya um you know they're not hitting military um targets and they're not um you know aruri is an important uh overseas element um for kasan but he's not an on the ground commander in the fight in Gaza um so it's a very separate um kind of attack um and I think that uh you know in the history that shows that these assassinations they don't work they don't work on the micro level when during the second and Tata Israel killed um assassinated 175 Palestinian activists and Fighters hunted them by name um and killed them they killed all of the top Hamas and Kasam um many uh leadership uh at the time of course they haven't been able to reach Muhammad DF who's the uh overall commander of the cassam brigades in Gaza and has been uh for a long time but many of the founding members of Hamas were assassinated at almost all of them yeah um and so I think in that sense it's it's something that Pro that we the history shows that it doesn't work um but I wouldn't also want to uh understate aru's importance he's a a very Central pillar and his death is a loss to the movement for sure thanks for watching this video please subscribe to our YouTube channel hit like leave a comment these engagements help us with the YouTube algorithm and it helps us to get around Silicon Valley censorship as much as possible it does make a difference you can also support our journalism by going to electronic in.net and clicking on donate now thank you