A suspected Israeli strike killed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ espionage chief for Syria and three other guard members on Saturday, Iran has said, in an attack that destroyed much of a multistorey residential building in Damascus.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said six people were killed in the Israeli strike on the upmarket Mazzeh neighbourhood in the Syrian capital.
In recent weeks, Israel has been accused of intensifying strikes on senior Iranian and allied figures in Syria and Lebanon, raising fears the war in Gaza could expand into a regional conflict.
“The Revolutionary Guards’ Syria [intelligence] chief, his deputy and two other guard members were martyred in the attack on Syria by Israel,” Iran’s Mehr news agency said.
In a statement, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirmed it had lost four of its members and blamed Israel.
The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, said Tehran would not let the “cowardly assassination” go unanswered.
When asked about the strike, the Israeli army said: “We do not comment on reports from the foreign media.”
Tensions between Iran and Israel have risen to a new high after the bloody surprise attack launched by Hamas into Israel on 7 October.
Hamas has had a close, if up and down, relationship with Iran for decades, as has Hezbollah, the Islamist militant organisation in Lebanon, which has traded fire with Israel across the disputed border for months.
Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes during more than a decade of civil war in Syria, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces as well as Syrian army positions. Saturday’s presumed Israeli strike was the second such high-profile targeted assassination in Syria in less than a month. In December, an Israeli airstrike killed a senior Iranian general there.
Israel has also targeted enemies in Lebanon. On 2 January in a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut, the deputy political leader of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in a strike widely blamed on Israel.
Days later, Israel killed Wissam al-Tawil, a senior Hezbollah commander, in a strike on his car in south Lebanon.
Israel rarely comments on individual strikes targeting Syria, but it has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran, which backs the government of the president, Bashar al-Assad, to expand its presence there.
Israeli analysts have spoken of a “multifront war”, with combat operations in Syria, Lebanon, the occupied West Bank and Gaza against what they describe as a coalition of enemies dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. Iran describes its networks of proxy armed factions as an axis of resistance.
Israel’s offensive in Gaza continued on Saturday with airstrikes and artillery shelling pounding targets across the territory. Fighters from Hamas battled tanks trying to advance into the eastern suburbs of the Jabaliya area in northern Gaza, where Israel has started pulling out troops and shifting to smaller-scale operations, residents and militant sources said.
In the southern area of Khan Younis, where Israel says it has expanded its operations against Hamas, witnesses said tanks shelled areas around Nasser hospital overnight, describing the bombardment as the most intense in many days.
Nasser is now Gaza’s largest functioning hospital. Israel says Hamas fighters operate from in and around hospitals, including Nasser, which Hamas and medical staff deny, though Israel has presented some footage and photos backing its claims.
The Israeli military said that in Khan Younis it raided a military compound, neutralised ready-to-use rocket launchers and found explosives stashed underground while an aircraft struck two gunmen there.
Israeli planes dropped leaflets on the southern area of Rafah urging Palestinians seeking refuge there to help locate hostages held by Hamas since the militant organisation launched bloody attacks into Israel in October, residents said.
The Gaza health ministry said Israeli strikes have killed 165 people and wounded 280 others in the past 24 hours, one of the biggest death tolls in a single day in 2024.
It did not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in its daily toll. But most of the 24,927 Palestinians killed since the 7 October war began are civilians, health officials say.
Israel has vowed to “crush” Hamas in Gaza after its fighters broke through a billion-dollar perimeter fence and surged into Israel on 7 October, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking about 250 hostages into Gaza.
In more than 100 days of war, Israel’s air, land and sea offensive has destroyed much of Gaza, displacing most of the 2.3 million population, many forced to move repeatedly and seek refuge in tents that do little to protect them from the elements and disease, according to the United Nations.
The leaflets dropped by Israel on Rafah showed photographs of 33 hostages, their names written in Arabic, urging the displaced to make contact. “Do you want to return home? Please make the call if you recognise one of them,” the leaflets read.
More than 100 of the hostages seized by Hamas were freed during a short-lived November truce in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel says 132 remain in Gaza, 27 of whom have been killed in captivity.
In Israel, political leaders are under increasing pressure to do more to free the hostages. Last week a senior minister called for a ceasefire to allow a deal and families of hostages camped outside Netanyahu’s residence in the coastal city of Caesarea.
“He needs to choose one [deal] and end the hostage saga,” said Eli Stivi, whose son, Idan, is being held incommunicado in Gaza.
