Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Friday sent a message of condolences to Hezbollah following the death of its military commander, Mustafa Badr al-Din.

In the message, quoted by the IRNA news agency, Zarif wrote that the “martyrdom of this great commander Mustafa will further strengthen the resistance forces against the Zionists and terrorism.”

Hezbollah said early Friday morning that al-Din had been killed in a blast at a base near Damascus airport.

Badr al-Din, who led Hezbollah’s intervention in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, was a key player in Hezbollah’s “so-called” military wing.

He was on a United States terror sanctions blacklist, a key suspect in the 2005 assassination in Beirut of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri which has been blamed on Hezbollah and was “most wanted” by Israel.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah did not say which of Badr al-Din’s many enemies it held responsible for his death, but second-in-command Sheikh Naim Qassem was quoted by AFP as having told mourners at his funeral he was killed in a “huge blast” at a Hezbollah position near Damascus airport.

He said a probe was under way, but “because there are many possibilities, we don’t want to anticipate the investigation.”

“I assure you however that within hours, no later than Saturday morning, we will give a detailed account about what caused the blast and who was behind it,” Qassem said, according to AFP.

Hezbollah has a “clear indication” on who was responsible and how it happened, “but we need some more time to be one hundred percent sure”, he stressed.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)