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19-02-2023
DAMASCUS/ JERUSALEM: At least five people have been martyred, 15 wounded and several residential buildings damaged in Israeli airstrikes on the Syrian capital Damascus, Syrian state media reported.
The raids early on Sunday hit a building in central Damascus’s Kafr Sousa neighborhood near a large, heavily guarded security complex close to Iranian installations, media said, citing witnesses.
Loud explosions were heard over a central area of the capital around 12.30am (2130 GMT Saturday), and the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that Syrian air defences were “confronting hostile targets in the sky around Damascus”.
Citing a military source, SANA reported that five people had been killed, among them a soldier, along with “destruction of a number of residential buildings”.
“It caused damage to several civilian homes and material damage to a number of neighborhoods 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.
Israel has not commented on the airstrikes which come more than a month after an Israeli missile attack hit the Damascus International Airport, killing four people, including two soldiers.
Israel targeting Syria
For almost a decade, Israel has been carrying out air attacks against suspected Iranian-sponsored weapons transfers and personnel deployments in neighboring 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.
Commenting on the latest attack, Nasser Kanani, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, blamed Israel for “trying to exacerbate the pain and suffering of the Syrian nation”.
“They are trying to exacerbate the pain and suffering of the Syrian nation at a time when it is faced with the effects of the recent destructive earthquake,” said Kanani, also calling on the UN Security Council to react to the strikes.
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. (Int’l News Desk)
