’23 killed’ as Israel strikes Iranian targets in Syria

Israel said it has struck dozens of Iranian targets in Syria in a “wide-scale” operation in response to rocket fire on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights the day before.

A Britain-based war monitoring group said the strikes killed at least 23 people, including 15 non-Syrians, some of them Iranians. Syrian state media only reported that two civilians were killed.

The exchange of fire along the increasingly tense border comes as Iran and its allies face blowback across the region, with mass protests against Tehran-aligned governments in Lebanon and Iraq, as well as demonstrations in Iran itself over a recent hike in fuel prices.

Israel has repeatedly struck Iran-linked targets in Syria in recent years and has warned against any permanent Iranian presence on the frontier.

Last week, Israel killed a senior commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed group in the Gaza Strip, setting off two days of heavy fighting. A separate air strike targeted but failed to kill an Islamic Jihad leader in Damascus, underscoring the risk of escalation at various pressure points across the volatile region.

In the latest incident, the Israeli military said fighter jets hit multiple targets belonging to Iran’s elite Quds force, including surface-to-air missiles, weapons warehouses and military bases. It said a number of Syrian aerial defence batteries were also destroyed after an air defence missile was fired.

The death toll was reported by Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition activist group with a network of contacts across Syria.

He said the dead included five Syrian troops, 16 Iranian and Iran-backed fighters, and two Syrian civilians.

The Observatory said the air strikes targeted Quds arms depots in the Damascus suburbs of Kisweh and Qudsaya. Mr Abdurrahman said several other areas were targeted in Wednesday’s strikes, including the Mazzeh air base in Damascus, where air defence units are stationed.

Syria’s state-run SANA news agency said the two civilians were killed by shrapnel when an Israeli missile hit a house in the town of Saasaa, south west of Damascus. It said several others were wounded, including a girl in a residential building in Qudsaya, also west of the Syrian capital.

It claimed that Syrian air defences destroyed most of the Israeli missiles before they reached their targets.

Wednesday’s strikes on Syria were the most intense since January 21, when Israel claimed a series of air strikes on Iranian military targets in the Arab country, including munition storage facilities, an intelligence site and a military training camp, in response to an Iranian missile attack the previous day.

Israel had said the missile, fired by Iranian forces in Syria, was intercepted over a ski resort on the Golan Heights and that there were no injuries. That Iranian launch followed a rare Israeli daylight air raid near Damascus International Airport.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military said it intercepted four incoming rockets from Syria. It said the attack “threatens Israeli security, regional stability and the Syrian regime”, and vowed to “continue operating firmly and resolutely” against Iran in Syria.