Israel accused of killing dozens in Syria air strikes

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Israeli air strikes on the northern Syrian province of Aleppo have killed and wounded numerous civilians and military personnel, Syria’s defence ministry has said.

“The Israeli enemy launched an air attack from the direction of Athriya, south-east of Aleppo, targeting a number of points in the Aleppo countryside,” the ministry said in a statement on Friday, without specifying the number of dead.

An opposition war monitor said the strikes killed 42 people, mostly Syrian troops. Reuters reported 38 killed, including civilians and military personnel.

Hizbollah’s media relations office told the Financial Times that five of the Lebanese militant group’s fighters were killed in the Aleppo strikes.

If the numbers are accurate, the attack would mark the deadliest Israeli strike in Syria since the outbreak of the war between Israel and militant group Hamas on October 7.

In its report on the Aleppo strikes, Syria’s state news agency SANA also said two civilians had been killed in an Israeli attack on a building in the Damascus countryside on Thursday.

Friday’s attack follows another suspected Israeli attack on Syria’s eastern Deir Ezzor province earlier this week, in which local media said at least 15 people were killed.

The US was forced to deny it had carried out the Deir Ezzor strikes after Syrian and Iranian media blamed its forces. Syria’s state news agency said at least one civilian was killed in the attack, while Iranian state media said an adviser from its elite Revolutionary Guards was also killed.

Israel did not immediately comment on the strike. It usually neither confirms nor denies accusations that it has carried out assassinations or strikes against Iran or Syria.

This week’s attacks are the latest escalation in regional hostilities that have erupted since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Israeli forces have conducted scores of air strikes against Iran-affiliated forces as part of an increasingly overt confrontation across the Middle East over the past decade. Israel has repeatedly struck targets in Syria, including the Aleppo and Damascus airports, as well as weapons depots tied to Tehran and its proxies in Syria.

But tensions between the two states have ratcheted up since the start of the war in Gaza, leading to deadlier strikes and prompting Iran to withdraw some of its senior officers from Syria.

Meanwhile an Israeli drone strike on Friday in southern Lebanon killed a member of Hizbollah, the group’s media relations office said. The strike followed the deadliest day of fighting between Israel and Hizbollah since October.

Near-daily clashes between Israel and Hizbollah have fuelled concerns about a broader regional conflagration, and have led to the mass evacuation of civilians on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon frontier.

The UN’s peacekeeping forces expressed concern about the escalation and said the organisation was “ready to support that process in any way we can, including by convening a tripartite meeting at the parties’ request”.

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters: “We’ve also been very, very clear: We do not support a war in Lebanon.”

Additional reporting by Bita Ghaffari in Tehran