First Saudi citizen martyred fighting for Hezbollah in Israeli attack on Lebanon

A Saudi national, Omran Karim, has reportedly been killed in Israeli air strikes in southern Lebanon, making him the first Gulf citizen to be martyred while fighting for Hezbollah against the occupation forces, according to Lebanese newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour.

Karim, a dentist residing in Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburb, hailed from the Shia-majority city of Qatif in eastern Saudi Arabia. He was the son of Ahmad Ibrahim Al-Moughassil, known as “Abu Omran”, a key figure in Saudi Hezbollah or “Hezbollah of the Hijaz” and the alleged mastermind behind the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US servicemen.

Al-Moughassil was designated a terrorist by the US and was on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list with a $5 million reward for information for his capture, before being arrested in Beirut in 2015 and extradited to Saudi Arabia. In 2016, Karim praised his mother, a Lebanese citizen, married to a man “wanted by the House of Saud” and “by the CIA and Interpol”, who was then “on death row.”

تشييع شهيدنا العزيز #عمران_المغسل من #القطيف الذي أرتقى شهيدا على #طريق_القدس في #لبنان دفاعاً عن #غزة ولبنان pic.twitter.com/HP2HuiX0eX

— علي هاشم 313 (@ALI_HASHIM_313A) November 11, 2024

According to Arabi21, Saudi authorities have also detained Fadhel Al-Mughassil, Ahmad’s brother, for several years, after issuing a 20-year prison sentence against him for reciting a poem in which he praised Hezbollah.

Tributes for Karim appeared on social media, and accounts linked to Hezbollah and Saudi Shia groups mourned his martyrdom “on the path to Al-Quds [Jerusalem].” There is no confirmed evidence of foreign recruits actively participating in Hezbollah’s operations, though thousands of fighters have expressed willingness to join the Lebanese resistance movement.

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