Brig. Gen. Muhammad Hussein-Zada Hejazi, the deputy commander of Iran’s Quds Force, has died of a "heart condition", the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced in a statement on Sunday.
Born in 1956 in the city of Isfahan, Hejazi joined the IRGC in 1979 and served in the Iran-Iraq War. He headed the organization's paramilitary Basij militia for over 10 years and as well as its deputy commander in 2008.
He was also identified by Israeli media reports as one of the suspected planners of the deadly 1994 bombing at the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed.
Hejazi was appointed as the deputy commander of the Quds Force — the IRGC's extraterritorial operations unit — in January 2020 following the killing of Iran’s top commander Qassem Soleimani by the United States.
According to an IDF report published in 2019, he served as the head of the organization's Lebanon detachment, overseeing all Iranian operations in the Levantine state and the Islamic State's proxy Hezbollah and its precision-guided missile program.
The Council of the European Union added Hejazi to its sanctions list in October 2011 for playing a central role in the crackdown on protests following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2009 election win. Opposition groups claimed the results were rigged.