✸The Salah Ghandour martyrdom operation

On 25 April 1995 Salah Ghandour, "Malak", blew up his car between two Israeli convoys at the entrance to the "Centre 17" headquarters at Saff al-Hawa in Bint Jbeil, seat of the western brigade's operations command, the civil administration and intelligence; Hezbollah put the enemy's losses at thirty dead and wounded. One of Hezbollah's few martyrdom operations after 1990. At the press conference (26 April) Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the target was a military convoy of five vehicles arriving "fresh from Palestine" to relieve the garrison of "Centre 17", which runs the collaborator networks and the car bombs, and that Ghandour had postponed the operation from Monday to Tuesday because of the density of civilian cars; he showed the film of the operation in reply to Army Radio's account of "safety distances" between the vehicles. The operation was dedicated to the commander Abu Ali Rida Yassine, assassinated by aircraft weeks earlier, and to the martyrs of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.