The Gaza war is reverberating across multiple fronts across the Middle East, having claimed nearly 25,000 lives in more than a hundred days of hostilities against the Palestinian Hamas militia. At least four members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were killed in Damascus this Saturday in the deadliest Israeli attack in Syria since the beginning of the conflict.
According to Iranian television, the head of the secret service of the Iranian mission advising the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was among those killed. The explosion caused by a wave of rockets completely destroyed the four-story building that served as the residence of Iranian military advisers in the Syrian capital's Mazzeh district, near a former military airport.
As usual regarding Syria, Israeli Defense Force spokesmen declined to confirm responsibility for the attack, which bears the hallmarks of retaliatory strikes by the Jewish state. Israeli aircraft have bombed hundreds of targets in Syria since 2011, when a long and bloody civil war erupted in the Arab country, although only a handful of these actions have been reported. Sources in the Syrian security services cited by Portal pointed to Israel as the perpetrator of the launch of the “precision missiles” and assured that a fifth person had died in the attack.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an NGO that has informants on the ground, said members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Iran's main allied militia in the Gaza Strip, also lived in the Mazzeh area where the attack took place. Iranian television reported that there were casualties among “Syrian forces,” without giving further details. Last December, two attacks attributed to Israel occurred in the Damascus metropolitan area, killing three members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
This Sunday's rocket operation comes after the destruction of Israel's “spy headquarters” in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, with Iranian ballistic missiles, which, according to the authorities of the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, killed four civilians. The Revolutionary Guard said last Tuesday that the target was “one of the headquarters of the Israeli spy agency Mossad in Iraqi Kurdistan.” The action was carried out in response to the Israeli bombing that killed Revolutionary Guard commander Razi Mousavi while he was in Damascus in December.
Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, Israel is continuing a large-scale offensive in Khan Younis in the south and some parts of Jablia in the north, although the army withdrew from this last area weeks ago. According to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian death toll from the Israeli offensive has now risen to 24,927.
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This Saturday, Israeli planes dropped leaflets over Rafah (southern Gaza Strip) calling on Palestinians displaced by the war to help them find the more than 130 Israeli hostages still being held by Palestinian militias and with the were kidnapped in the October 7 attacks.
On the northern front, at least two people died this Saturday in an Israeli drone strike that targeted a vehicle in southern Lebanon, official sources in Beirut reported, citing Efe.
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