Thousands of people gathered in Tehran on Friday for the funerals of seven members of the Revolutionary Guards killed in a strike in Syria that Iran blamed on Israel.
The Guards, including two generals, were killed Monday, with the airstrike leveling the Iranian embassy’s consular annex in Damascus.
Israel has not commented on the strike, but analysts saw it as an escalation of its campaign against Iran and its regional proxies that runs the risk of triggering a wider war beyond the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip.
Friday’s ceremony coincided with the annual Quds (Jerusalem) Day commemoration when Iran and its allies stage marches in support of the Palestinians. Iran’s Press TV, an English-language government mouthpiece, reported that millions of people were rallying around the world, with pro-Palestinian rallies being held at 2,000 locations around Iran.
Iran has said that among the dead in the strike were two brigadier generals from the Guards’ foreign operations arm, the Quds Force: Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi.
Zahedi was reportedly responsible for the IRGC’s operations in Syria and in Lebanon, for Iranian militias there, and for ties with Hezbollah, and was thus the most senior commander of Iranian forces in the two countries. Rahimi was his deputy.
Five other IRGC officers were killed, along with at least one member of the Hezbollah terror group.
Both Iran and its proxy Hezbollah have vowed that Israel will not go unpunished for the attack. Though that possibility has raised the specter of a wider war, two Iranian sources told Reuters that Tehran’s response would be calibrated to avoid escalation.
On Friday, the coffins of the seven slain IRGC members were placed on the trailers of two trucks in one of the largest squares in the Iranian capital, an AFP journalist said.
Mourners held Iranian and Palestinian flags, as well as those from the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah group.
Pictures of the men killed were displayed on the trucks, accompanied by the slogan “Martyrs on the road to Jerusalem.” The war in Gaza began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 were kidnapped and taken to the Strip as hostages. Tehran backs Hamas but has denied any direct involvement in that attack.
One placard on Friday echoed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s pledge to strike back after the Damascus strike, reading: “We will make them regret this crime.”
After Friday’s funeral ceremony in Tehran, the bodies of the Revolutionary Guards killed in Damascus will be taken to their home towns for burial.
State television broadcast footage of similar gatherings on Friday in other Iranian cities including Mashhad, Qom, Sanandaj and Shahrekord.
Khamenei said on Wednesday the Damascus strike was a “desperate” effort by Israel that “will not save them from defeat” in Gaza.
The attack in Damascus, which the Observatory said killed 16 people in total, was the fifth raid on Syria in a week that has been blamed on Israel.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to respond to efforts to harm Israelis, as the country geared up for a possible Iranian response to Israel’s alleged assassination of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in Syria.
Speaking at a meeting of the security cabinet soon after a phone call with US President Joe Biden, Netanyahu said “Iran has been acting against us for years — directly and via proxies. And, therefore, Israel acts against Iran and its proxies — defensively and offensively.”
Netanyahu added: “We will know how to defend ourselves, and we will act according to the simple principle: that those who harm us or plan to harm us, we will harm.”