Islamic Jihad says ready to send more fighters from Syria to Lebanon in case of war with Israel

The Syrian branch of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group is prepared to send more forces to Lebanon in case Israel launches a full-scale war against Hezbollah, an Islamic Jihad official said.

“All Palestinian youth look forward to facing the Israeli occupation and joining Hezbollah in this resistance,” said Ismail al-Sendawi, national relations officer for the Islamic Jihad in Syria. He spoke at a ceremony in Damascus commemorating members of the group from Syria who died fighting in Lebanon over the past eight months.

Sixteen Palestinian refugees from Syria, all Islamic Jihad members, have died to date fighting on the Israel-Lebanon border.

Ahmad Saleh, 62, said his 22-year-old son, Mohammad, a former factory worker, was killed in southern Lebanon in December and his older son is still fighting there.

“I am proud that I am the father of a martyr. My son is a fighter for the children of Gaza and a fighter for Palestine,” he said. “I encouraged my son to join the fight in the south.”

Like the larger and stronger Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad was formed in the 1980s as a radical Islamist movement to resist Israel’s occupation of Gaza.

Hezbollah, which is allied with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and, like them, backed by Iran, has been clashing near-daily with Israeli forces against the backdrop of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. The fighting has escalated in recent weeks, raising fears of a full-scale war on the Lebanon-Israel front.