Israeli airstrike in Syria kills four Iranian Revolutionary Guards
The attack comes amid widening tensions in West Asia as Israel pushes ahead with its war on Gaza.
An Israeli missile strike on a residential building in Syria’s capital Damascus on Saturday killed four members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and “a number of Syrian forces”, reported Al Jazeera.
The targetted building was being used by Iranian advisers supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government, reported Reuters.
The attack comes amid widening tensions in West Asia as Israel pushes ahead with its war on Gaza, which has been ongoing for 15 weeks. The Israeli military’s air and ground operations in the besieged Palestinian territory have killed over 23,000 people so far. The war was triggered after Palestinian militant group Hamas led an incursion into southern Israel. The group killed 1,200 people and took over 200 hostages.
The Iranian state television has described Saturday’s strike as a “terrorist” attack by Israel, according to Al Jazeera.
A spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad said that no members of the terror group were wounded in the strike.
The attack comes days after an Iranian strike in northern Iraq against what Tehran claimed were Israeli “spy headquarters”. The Revolutionary Guard had said that it carried out strikes on the headquarters of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
In December, an Israeli airstrike outside Damascus had killed a senior advisor in the Revolutionary Guards. The advisor, identified as Sayyed Razi Mousavi, was responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Syria and Iran.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had reacted to Mousavi’s killing by saying that the action showed the “Zionist regime’s frustration and weakness in the region”. Raisi said that Tel Aviv would “certainly pay the price”.
Over the past weeks, rockets have been fired from Syria into northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, reported the Associated Press. The action has further escalated tensions along the Lebanon-Israel border.