A US drone strike on a car in Baghdad has killed three members of the powerful Kataib Hezbollah militia, including a high-ranking commander, officials said after a string of blasts were heard in the Iraqi capital. The strike late on Wednesday came on a main thoroughfare in the Mashtal neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. A crowd gathered as emergency response teams picked through the wreckage. Security forces closed off the heavily guarded Green Zone, where a number of diplomatic compounds are located, amid calls for protesters to storm the US embassy. Two US officials familiar with the matter said that a senior Kataib Hezbollah commander was targeted in the attack. Two officials with Iran-backed militias in Iraq said that one of the three killed was Wissam Mohammed “Abu Bakr” al-Saadi, the commander in charge of Kataib Hezbollah’s operations in Syria. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to journalists. The strike came amid roiling tensions in the region and days after the US military launched an air assault on dozens of sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in retaliation for a drone strike that killed three US troops in Jordan in late January. The US has blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a broad coalition of Iran-backed militias, for the attack in Jordan, and officials have said they suspect Kataib Hezbollah in particular of leading it. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has regularly claimed strikes on bases housing US troops in Iraq and Syria against the backdrop of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, saying that they are in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel in its war in Gaza that has killed 27,707 Palestinians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. Kataib Hezbollah had said in a statement that it was suspending attacks on American troops to avoid “embarrassing the Iraqi government” after the strike in Jordan, but others have vowed to continue fighting. On Sunday, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed a drone attack on a base housing US troops in eastern Syria killed six fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led group allied with the United States. The latest surge in the regional conflict came shortly after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Wednesday rejected terms proposed by Hamas for a hostage-release agreement that would lead to a permanent ceasefire, vowing to continue the war until “absolute victory”.