At least five Iranian military advisors and a number of Syrian forces were killed in an Israeli missile strike on a building in Damascus on Saturday, Iran\u2019s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported, in another sign of building hostilities in the Middle East as Israel\u2019s war with Hamas enters its fourth month. <\/p>\n
The alleged strike targeted the Mazzeh neighborhood in Syria\u2019s capital, home to several diplomatic missions including the Iranian embassy, according to Syrian authorities. <\/p>\n
Israel \u201claunched an air attack from the Golan Heights at 10:20 a.m. local time that targeted a residential building in the Mazzeh neighborhood,\u201d the Syrian Ministry of Defense alleged, adding that some missiles were shot down by national defense forces. <\/p>\n
A number of buildings and nearby vehicles around the targeted building were damaged in the blast, Syria\u2019s state broadcaster reported, with civil defense teams still searching for victims trapped under the rubble. <\/p>\n
One of the dead, Hojjatollah Omidvar, was described by Iran\u2019s semi-official Student News Network as a deputy chief of the Quds Force intelligence unit in Syria \u2013 one of five branches of the Revolutionary Guards unit in charge of foreign operations. <\/p>\n
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) identified the four others killed as military advisors Ali Aghazadeh, Hossein Mohammadi, Saeed Karimi and Mohammad Amin Samadi. Their presence in Syria had been \u201cat the official invitation of the Syrian government,\u201d Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, noted in a statement on social media. <\/p>\n
The attack in Damascus comes amid concerns that Israel\u2019s war with Hamas in Gaza is spiraling into a regional war. In northern Iraq, an Iranian missile attack last week targeted what Tehran claimed to be a spy base for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. in Lebanon, militant group\u00a0Hezbollah\u00a0has engaged in near-daily confrontations with Israeli forces across the border. And from Yemen, Houthi rebels have launched a series of attacks on commercial ships and Western military vessels in the Red Sea. <\/p>\n
Attacks by Iranian-backed groups in the Middle East won\u2019t stop until\u00a0Israel\u2019s war on Hamas\u00a0in Gaza ends, Tehran\u2019s top diplomat warned on Wednesday, echoing comments by several groups in Iran\u2019s network of influence. <\/p>\n
Since Israel launched its ground and air campaign in Gaza, in response to Hamas\u2019 bloody October 7 terror attacks, nearly 25,000 people have been killed in the blockaded Palestinian enclave \u2013 the majority of them women and children \u2013 according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah. <\/p>\n
The US, a key Israel ally, has also stepped in militarily, launching strikes in Yemen with the aim of degrading Houthi capabilities to harm the vital Red Sea shipping lane. In comments on Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller emphasized that a larger conflagration could be avoided and highlighted a flurry of US diplomatic activity in the Middle East. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe continue to engage in diplomatic efforts to try to make clear to everyone in the region that we don\u2019t want to see the conflict escalated, that we don\u2019t think it\u2019s in any country\u2019s interest to see the conflict escalated,\u201d Miller said Wednesday. <\/p>\n
But the path to de-escalation will be hard to find. Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi on Saturday vowed to \u201cpunish\u201d Israel for the Damascus missile strike. The killing was \u201canother stain on the record of all governments who claim to be the advocates of human rights because it violated Syria\u2019s airspace and trampled on human and international laws,\u201d he said, in comments reported by Iranian state media. <\/p>\n\n
At least five Iranian military advisors and a number of Syrian forces were killed in an Israeli missile strike on a building in Damascus on Saturday, Iran\u2019s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported, in another sign of building hostilities in the Middle East as Israel\u2019s war with Hamas enters its fourth month. The alleged strike targeted <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14355,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}