IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi on Sunday said that Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani was "personally in charge" of executing a suicide drone attack operation against Israel.
Soleimani commands the Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite extraterritorial black-ops unit. He is widely considered one of the most powerful generals in the Iranian armed forces.
Taking to Twitter, Soleimani dismissed the Israeli strike that thwarted the Iranian plot, saying that "these operations are absolutely the last struggles of the Zionist Regime."
In a military briefing on Sunday Kochavi said the drone attack "was supposed to include several explosive drones against a number of targets [in Israel]. The person who was directly and personally in charge of executing this attack is Qasem Soleimani. He funded and trained Shiite operatives who were supposed to execute the operation."
The IDF chief said that the military "needs to prepare for every contingency and we'll do it in the best possible way."
Director of Military Intelligence Maj. Gen. Tamir Heyman released a statement saying that "thanks to a substantial intelligence-gathering effort, an Iranian attack was thwarted."
The IDF's official Twitter account later features some of the details of Sunday's operation in Syria.
"Soleimani commanded an attack of killer drones on Israel," one tweet explained. "Iranian Quds operatives flew to the Damascus Intl. Airport with drones & explosives, and continued to an Iranian base in Syria to prepare for an attack on Israel."
In a later tweet, the IDF appeared to mock Soleimani's attempt to carry out a large-scale attack using suicide drones, saying, "It sounded good in your morning meeting, didn't it?"
