BEIRUT: Syria’s health minister updated earlier estimates on Monday, stating that 18 people were killed in central Hama province by Israeli attacks overnight. However, a war monitor reported a greater number of deaths related to the raids on military targets.
After Syria’s civil conflict began in 2011, the Israeli military has conducted hundreds of attacks there; it has refrained from commenting on the most recent incident that has been reported.
Syria’s Health Minister Hassan al-Ghabash told AFP, “The number of martyrs of the brutal Israeli aggression reached 18 martyrs and 37 wounded.”
According to Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, this was “one of the most violent Israeli attacks” in years in Syria, as reported by AFP.
The Israeli adversary launched an air attack from the direction of northwest Lebanon at “around 11:20pm (2020 GMT) on Sunday, targeting a number of military sites in the central region,” according to an earlier report from the state news agency SANA, which cited a military source. According to SANA, air defenses “shot down some” of the missiles.
Drones and Missiles
The Observatory war monitor gave an updated death toll of 26 people, citing “intense Israeli strikes” during the night and naming “five civilians, four soldiers and intelligence personnel, and 14 Syrians working with pro-Iran groups.”
It also said that three more bodies were unidentified.
The strikes, according to the Britain-based Observatory, were directed at locations “where pro-Iran groups and weapons development experts are stationed.” The Observatory is based on a network of sources within Syria.
According to the Observatory, “buildings and military centers” were destroyed after “Israeli strikes… targeted the scientific research area in Masyaf” in the province of Hama and other locations.
Iranian professionals “developing arms including precision missiles and drones” were employed at the scientific research center that was targeted, according to Observatory Chief Rahman.
craters and burnt vehicles
An AFP correspondent who was on the scene as part of an official media tour saw burned automobiles on both sides of the road and nearby trees that were still blazing.
The correspondent added that the raids also destroyed five sizable holes on the major road leading to Masyaf.
Nasser Kanani, a spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry, declared during a media conference that “we strongly condemn this criminal attack by the Zionist regime on Syrian soil.”
The raids were denounced by Syria’s foreign ministry, which charged Israel with attempting to “provoke a further escalation in the region.”
After Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel triggered a war in Gaza, Israeli raids on Syria increased. However, after an Israeli-attributed strike on the Iranian consulate building in Damascus on April 1, those raids somewhat decreased.
A wider regional war has been feared as a result of the fallout from the Israel-Hamas conflict, which Syria has attempted to avoid.
The Observatory had reported that seven pro-Iranian fighters had died in strikes that were blamed on Israel in late August in the central Homs region of Syria.
A few days later, the Israeli military claimed to have struck Islamic Jihad, an associate of Hamas, in Syria close to the Lebanese border, killing an unknown number of fighters.
A 2011 revolt that was brutally put down by the Syrian government set off a conflict that has claimed over 500,000 lives and attracted international fighters and armies.
Hezbollah and other organizations supported by Iran have supported President Bashar al-Assad’s army in Syria’s civil war.
