Israeli strike in Syria said to target top Hezbollah official in arms smuggling unit
Syrian state media reports 7 killed in Damascus after building hit near Iranian embassy; not immediately clear if reported assassination attempt successful
An alleged Israeli airstrike on Damascus Tuesday targeted a top Hezbollah official who is part of a unit tasked with delivering weapons from Iran and its proxies to the terror group in Lebanon, according to a Saudi report.
Syria’s state-run SANA news agency claimed seven civilians were killed and 11 others were wounded in the strike, which hit a residential and commercial building in the Mezzeh district of the capital a few hundred meters from the Iranian embassy.
Multiple reports said the targeted building is linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
SANA cited a military source who said the strike also caused “significant material damage.” It added that rescue forces were still working to extract people from under the rubble.
State media earlier claimed that Syria’s air defenses had intercepted “hostile” targets in the vicinity of Damascus.
The Saudi news outlet Al-Hadath reported the target of the Damascus strike was a member of Hezbollah’s Unit 4400, but did not say if the attempt was successful. The IDF has overseen efforts in recent weeks to stop the unit’s arms smuggling to Hezbollah.
Last week, the commander of Hezbollah’s Unit 4400, Muhammad Ja’far, was killed in a strike in Beirut, while his brother was reportedly killed days later in an alleged Israeli strike in Damascus.
On Friday, the IDF said that fighter jets struck a two-mile-long tunnel that crossed between Lebanon and Syria, and which the military said was used by Unit 4400 to smuggle weapons.
Last month, it was reported that Israeli special forces carried out a massive raid on an Iranian weapons facility in the Masyaf area in Syria, killing at least 14 people, wounding 43, and sparking fires.
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Israel — which rarely comments on individual strikes in Syria — is believed to have carried out hundreds of strikes, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters including from Hezbollah.
Since Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre last year, which saw some 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 kidnapped, Israel has escalated its strikes on Iranian-backed terror targets in Syria and has also struck Syrian army air defenses and some Syrian forces.
Hezbollah has been exchanging near-daily fire with Israel since it started launching attacks from Lebanon a day after its Palestinian ally Hamas’s terror onslaught, which sparked the war in Gaza.
The Times of Israel Community.