Israeli raids on Syria’s Damascus kills five people: Report

Syrian media say Israel fired missiles on Damascus’s Kafr Sousa neighbourhood, killing five and wounding 15.

Israeli missile attacks on the Syrian capital, Damascus, have killed five people and damaged several residential buildings, according to officials and media reports.

The raids early on Sunday hit a building in central Damascus’s Kafr Sousa neighbourhood near a large, heavily guarded security complex close to Iranian installations, the Reuters news agency said, citing witnesses.

The Syrian SANA news agency, quoting a military source, said Israel carried out the raids targeting several areas in the capital shortly after midnight, causing five deaths and 15 injuries among civilians, and damage to several residential buildings.

“It caused damage to several civilian homes and material damage to a number of neighbourhoods in Damascus and its vicinity,” the army said in a statement.

Footage posted by state media showed that a 10-storey building was badly damaged in the attack, crushing the structure of its lower floors.

“The strike on Sunday is the deadliest Israeli attack in the Syrian capital,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a United Kingdom-based group that has a wide network of sources inside Syria.

It was not immediately clear whether the raid was aimed at a specific individual.

Pro-Iran Hezbollah’s top commander Imad Mughniyeh was killed in 2008 in a bombing in Kafr Sousa, a heavily-policed area where residents say several Iranian security agencies are located, including a major cultural centre.

An Israeli military spokesperson declined to comment.

The attack comes more than a month after an Israeli missile attack hit the Damascus International Airport, killing four people, including two soldiers.

For almost a decade, Israel has been carrying out air attacks against suspected Iranian-sponsored weapons transfers and personnel deployments in neighbouring Syria. Israeli officials have rarely acknowledged responsibility for specific operations.

The raids — which in recent months have targeted Syrian airports and air bases — are part of an escalation of what has been a low-intensity conflict whose goal was to slow down Iran’s growing entrenchment in Syria, Israeli military experts say.

Iran has expanded its military presence in Syria in recent years and has a foothold in most state-controlled areas, with thousands of members of militias and local paramilitary groups under its command, Western intelligence sources say.

Iran’s proxy militias, led by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, now hold sway in vast areas in eastern, southern and northwestern Syria and in several suburbs around the capital.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government has never publicly acknowledged that Iranian forces operate on his behalf in Syria’s civil war, saying Tehran has only military advisers on the ground.