Early on Sunday, Israeli aircraft struck a suburb in Damascus, the capital of Syria, killing at least five people and injuring 15, according to Syrian official media.
Around 12:30 a.m. local time, loud explosions were heard over a portion of the city’s centre, and according to SANA, Syrian air defences were “confronting hostile targets in the sky around Damascus.”
In addition to “damage of a number of residential buildings,” the Syrian state media outlet SANA stated that five persons had been killed, including one soldier, and 15 civilians had been injured.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor based in the United Kingdom, 15 people—including a woman—were murdered in attacks on locations linked to Iranian militias and the Lebanese militant organisation Hezbollah.
According to the report, they occurred in the countryside surrounding Damascus and on an Iranian school in the capital’s Kafr Sousa suburb.
Sites close to Damascus are usually the target of Israeli bombings.
The attacks on Saturday night were the first since a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Syria and Turkey on February 6.
The Syrian army stated on January 2 that Israel’s military had launched missiles at the international airport of Syria’s capital early on Monday, rendering it inoperable and killing two troops and injuring a third.
Israel has attacked targets inside of Syria’s government-controlled territory hundreds of times in recent years, although it rarely admits or talks about the attacks.
Yet, Israel has confirmed that it strikes the facilities of militant organisations with ties to Iran, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which dispatched thousands of men to aid the Syrian Army’s battle against Islamist terrorist groups, including ISIS.
The Israeli attacks occur in the midst of a larger covert conflict between Israel and Iran.
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