AMMAN/CAIRO (Reuters) – Israeli airstrikes killed 16 people in western Syria and wounded dozens more overnight, Syrian state media reported on Monday, the deadliest Israeli attack reported by Syrian authorities since the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus was hit in April.
There was no immediate comment from Israel, which typically remains silent on reports of strikes in Syria.
The Syrian state news agency SANA, citing a military source, said Israel had launched the strikes at around 11:20 p.m. (2020 GMT on Sunday and targeted “a number of military sites in the central region”, without elaborating on what was struck.
Syrian air defences had shot down some of the missiles, the source said. SANA cited a local health official as saying 36 people had been wounded, six of whom were in serious condition.
Two regional intelligence sources said a major military research centre for chemical arms production located near Masyaf, in Hama province near the Mediterranean coast, had been hit several times. They said it was believed to house a team of Iranian military experts involved in weapons production.
However, a senior regional military source close to Damascus and Tehran denied the accounts that it was a chemical weapons facility, saying that the target was a well-known Syrian research facility.
The Syrian foreign ministry condemned the attack as an act of blatant aggression. In addition to the 16 fatalities and 36 wounded, it had caused “material damage to some residential areas”, it said in a statement reported by SANA.
Iran’s foreign minister spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said Tehran strongly condemned the “criminal attack” in Syria.
“We do not confirm what was reported by media outlets linked to the Zionist regime (Israel) about an attack on an Iranian centre or a centre under Iran’s protection”, he said during a news conference, in response to a question about the attack.
Syrian state media also reported that the strikes caused two fires, which firefighters were working to extinguish.
Israel has for years been targeting what it has described as Iranian or Iran-backed targets in Syria, where Iranian forces and Tehran-backed militias deployed widely to support President Bashar al-Assad during Syria’s civil war.
It has stepped up the campaign since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel from Gaza, including the April 1 attack that hit the Iranian embassy compound and killed senior Iranian commanders including one of Tehran’s top generals.
(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman, Ahmed Tolba and Adam Makary in Cairo; writing by Hatem Maher; editing by Michael Georgy, Gareth Jones and Mark Heinrich)
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