An Israeli strike on a villa on Syria’s coast Friday killed three people, local media and officials alleged. Some reports claimed an Iranian military adviser was among the dead.
A local hospital speaking to Germany’s dpa news agency confirmed three deaths and seven injured in an attack near the port city of Baniyas.
London-based Iran International, citing media close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, said IRGC commander Reza Zarei was killed in the incident.
AFP, citing the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the house sheltered “a group affiliated with Iran.” The observatory said the building was destroyed, killing the Iranian military adviser and two other non-Syrians who were with him.
Widely cited by Western media, the Observatory, run by a single person, has been accused by Syrian war analysts of false reporting and inflating casualty numbers.
There was no comment from Syrian authorities.
There was also no statement from Israel, which rarely comments on individual strikes targeting Syria, but it has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran, which backs President Bashar Assad’s government, to expand its presence there.
Video purportedly from the scene showed people looking on at damaged and ruined buildings.
Wednesday night saw Israeli strikes caused damage to sites near Damascus, Syria’s defense ministry said, in what appeared to be the latest attack in an intensified campaign against Iran-backed forces in the country.
“The Israeli enemy launched air strikes from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting a number of sites in the Damascus countryside,” the ministry said in a statement carried by state media.
It claimed that most missiles were shot down, a regular assertion on alleged Israeli strikes that analysts are generally skeptical of.
“The losses were limited to material,” Syria’s official SANA outlet reported.
An AFP correspondent in the Syrian capital heard explosions followed by the sirens of ambulances.
Pro-Iranian Lebanese television al Maydeen said a large explosion was heard in the heavily fortified Sayeda Zainab neighborhood of the Syrian capital, home to a major Shi’ite shrine. It gave no further details.
Regional intelligence sources say Iran’s Quds Force and the militias it backs, whose presence has spread in Syria in recent years, have a strong presence in the Sayeda Zainab neighborhood.
The neighborhood is in southern Damascus, where Iran-backed groups have a string of underground bases.
On Sunday, an Israeli strike on a truck in Syria near the Lebanese border killed two Hezbollah members, according to a source close to the Lebanese terror group.
A day later, Israel struck a site deep inside Lebanon, in the Baalbek region near the border with Syria, which is thought to be used as a major route for weapons transfers.