Israeli strike on Syria’s Damascus kills Iranian Guards official

An Israeli missile strike on Syria’s capital Damascus on Saturday killed a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and wounded others.

Syrian state media said a likely Israeli attack had targeted a building in the Mazzeh neighborhood of Damascus, without giving further details. Other local media in Syria reported explosions heard across the Syrian capital, AlArabia news reports.

The security source, part of a network of groups close to Syria’s government and its major ally Iran, said the multi-story building was used by Iranian advisers supporting President Bashar al-Assad’s government, and that it was entirely flattened by “precision-targeted Israeli missiles.”

There was no immediate comment from Israel.

Essam Al-Amin, head of the Al-Mowasat Hospital in Damascus, told local Syrian outlet Al-Watan Online that his hospital had received one corpse and three wounded people, including a woman, following Saturday’s attack.

Meanwhile, a war monitor said the strike killed five people.

“An Israeli missile strike targeted a four-story building, killing five people... and destroying the whole building where Iran-aligned leaders were meeting,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The British-based monitor with a network of sources inside Syria said the targeted neighbourhood is known to be a high-security zone home to leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and pro-Iran Palestinian factions.

“They were for sure targeting senior members” of those groups, said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.

A spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad told Reuters that no members of their group were wounded in the strike, following reports that some were at the bombed-out building.

Israel has long pursued a bombing campaign against Iran-linked targets in Syria. But it has shifted to deadlier strikes in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel by militants of the Iranian-backed Palestinian group Hamas from Gaza.

In December, an Israeli strike killed two Guards members, and another on December 25 killed a senior adviser to the Guards who was overseeing military coordination between Syria and Iran.