DAMASCUS – An Israeli airstrike on Damascus killed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s (IRGC) spy chief for Syria and four other Guards members on Saturday.
The strike tore into a multi-storey residential building.
Iran condemned the strike as a “desperate attempt to spread instability in region”.
“Iran…reserves its right to respond to the organised terrorism of the fake Zionist regime at the appropriate time and place,” foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a Britain-based monitor, said 10 people were killed in the Israeli strike on the Mazzeh neighbourhood of the Syrian capital.
The Mazzeh area is also home to the United Nations headquarters, embassies and restaurants.
In recent weeks, Israel has been accused of intensifying strikes on senior Iranian and allied figures in Syria and Lebanon — backers of Hamas — raising fears the Gaza crisis could expand.
“The Revolutionary Guards’ Syria intelligence chief, his deputy and three other Guards members were martyred in the attack on Syria by Israel,” Iran’s Mehr news agency said, quoting an informed source.
In a statement, the IRGC confirmed it lost five of its members in the strike that it accused Israel of carrying out.
The Guards’ Sepah news agency said in an early report the “evil and criminal Zionist regime (Israel)” killed four of its military advisers. It identified them as Hojatollah Omidvar, Ali Aghazadeh, Hossein Mohammadi and Saeed Karimi.
The mid-morning strike, which caused a large plume of smoke to billow into the sky, was also reported by Syrian state media.
The war-torn country’s official news agency, SANA, said a residential building in Damascus’s Mazzeh neighbourhood had been targeted in the Israeli aggression.
The Syrian defence ministry said the strike killed “a number of civilians”.
