BEIRUT (Dispatches) -- 
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said here Monday a senior commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) assassinated in the Israeli airstrike in Syria last week was a true supporter of Gaza and its ongoing battle against the Zionist regime.
Nasrallah made the remarks in a televised address to mark seven days since Brigadier General Muhammad Reza Zahedi was assassinated along 12 other people in an Israeli attack on Iran’s consulate in Syrian capital Damascus.
Nasrallah said General Zahedi had supported Gaza since the very start of the Al-Aqsa Storm, an unprecedented military operation by resistance groups in Gaza against Israel which triggered the brutal Israeli aggression on Gaza on October 7.
“Martyr Zahedi’s heart was beating for Gaza and his eyes, mind and thoughts were dedicated to Gaza from the first day of the Al-Aqsa Storm until the time of his martyrdom,” he said.
The Hezbollah chief said Israel’s attack on Iranian consulate in Damascus affected the equations in the Gaza war and forced U.S. President Joe Biden to move to restrain the Zionist regime and its hawkish prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He said Iran’s presence in Syria, which has been used as a pretext by Israel to launch attacks on the Arab country in recent years, is just to provide military advice to the Syrian government, adding that IRGC commanders and officers have been present in Syria and Lebanon since the very early years of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in the 1980s.
Nasrallah said the IRGC has insisted on maintaining its military advisors in the region to support the resistance in Lebanon and in Palestine and to strengthen the Syrian army in its battle against terrorist organizations.
Nasrallah further said the Americans and the Zionists have come to know that Iran’s response to last week attack on Iranian consular mission in Damascus is on the way, stressing that it is Iran’s natural right to retaliate.
Targeting Iranian advisers in the country’s consulate in Damascus is the highest level of Zionist aggression against Syria in the past several years, he said, adding the attack occurred due to Tel Aviv’s defeat in the “world war against Syria” in which the Zionist regime was also involved.
Nasrallah stressed two points about this attack, saying that it was firstly an aggression against the Iranian soil and the second point was the level of the attack as it targeted General Zahedi who was the head of the Iranian military advisors in Syria and Lebanon.
“This fight is not merely aimed at liberating the religious sites, rather it seeks to free the Ummah from the projects of the occupiers and looting,” he said.  
Nasrallah said Netanyahu will hamper the ceasefire talks, because he sees ceasefire as the end of the Likud party.