Hezbollah's al-Manar TV interrupted regular programming on Wednesday to announce the murder of Imad Mughnieh, said to be the chief of special operations and intelligence of the group's military wing. It said that a "great jihadi from the Islamic resistance in Lebanon has become a martyr."

While the Syrian government did not issue a statement regarding the car bombing, Hezbollah officials said Mughnieh was killed when his car exploded in the residential neighborhood of Kfar Suseh in Damascus on Tuesday night. No one else was reported killed, as the Syrian authorities sealed off the area after the blast.

The Iran-backed Shiite guerrilla group quickly accused Israel and its secret service, the Mossad, of the assassination, saying he "died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists," ignoring an Israeli denial.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office issued a vague disclaimer, saying: "Israel rejects any attempt by terrorist organizations to attribute to it any implication in this affair." Israel, as well as the United States, regards Hezbollah as a terrorist group.

Nevertheless, Israeli officials did not hide their approval for the killing of Mughnieh. Former senior intelligence officers welcomed the death of a "top terrorist," who has been on the Israeli and U.S. FBI's most wanted lists, ahead of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

Mughnieh, in his late 40s, has been in hiding for the past 20 years and had escaped previous Mossad assassination attempts in the 1990s.

Israeli analysts say it is expected that the Israeli government would refrain from taking responsibility for the Hezbollah commander's murder, as it has done before after other successful assassinations of leaders it considered to be terrorists, in Damascus and elsewhere.

Mughnieh, said to have been closely linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's al-Quds Force, allegedly masterminded or participated in a number of attacks, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American servicemen, and the 1985 hijacking of a TWA plane during which an American was killed.

He was also accused of taking part in an attack on an Argentine-Israeli association that killed 85 people, and the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, in which 29 people died.

Israel also suspects him of having been involved in the capture of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border operation that sparked the July 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon.

Hezbollah officials believe that either the Israeli or U.S. special operational forces carried out Mughnieh's assassination, which drew widespread condemnation in Lebanon, including a denunciation by pro-Western parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri, who will lead a massive demonstration in downtown Beirut on Thursday to mark the third anniversary of the assassination of his father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The demonstration will coincide with Mughnieh's funeral in Beirut's southern suburbs – something that many Lebanese believe will probably help avert possible clashes between the supporters of the rival Hezbollah-led opposition and the anti-Syrian ruling majority.

Iran also condemned Mughnieh's killing. Foreign Ministry spokesman, Muhammad Ali Hosseini, described it as "a clear example of the organized terrorism of the Zionist regime," saying the man's record was, "a golden page in the history of the people's fight against Zionist aggressors."

As a symbol of dedicated militant resistance against Israel, Mughnieh's assassination in the heart of Damascus is largely seen by the anti-Israeli resistance camp as a security breach of Syria, which has been the only Arab state to support its causes.

Palestinian Islamists and leftist factions fear that the ability of Israeli, U.S. or other Western intelligence services to breach the stiff Syrian security system and kill the clandestine Hezbollah leader, even after 20 years, means that any of their own leaders, whom Israel brands as "terrorists," are unsafe.

Israeli officials played on those fears. Environment Minister Gideon Ezra, a former director of Israel's domestic security agency Shin Beth, said he hoped that "every terrorist knows that he will eventually be caught, and I am glad that this has happened to Mughnieh. And I hope that whoever did this receives the congratulations he is due."

Another former Shin Beth chief, cabinet minister without portfolio Ami Ayalon, said the man's death was a "message to terrorists that none of them is invulnerable."

While Mughnieh's assassination is seen as a clear threat to all anti-Israeli resistance groups and their leaders, his assassination may also open up a new kind of confrontation.

A member of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine privately told the Middle East Times that Israel may have denied involvement because, "it knows that targeting an important head beyond the battlefields means Israel is setting itself up for its own leaders to be attacked in the battlefields [Palestinian Territories and Lebanon] and outside."

The car bombing drew calls for vengeance against Israeli leaders and interests in Israel and abroad, triggering Israeli media demands to boost security in the country and for its interests overseas.