BEIRUT: Three pro-Iran fighters were killed on Friday in Israeli strikes south of the Syrian capital, a war monitor said, the second such attack this week.

Syrian state media reported damage from “Israeli” air strikes south of Damascus, but did not mention any casualties.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said “three members of pro-Iran groups, including an Iranian and an Iraqi national” were killed in “Israeli air strikes,” adding the toll was provisional.

Strikes hit a site belonging to Lebanon’s Hezbollah group on a road leading to the Sayyida Zeinab district, the Observatory said, while a site previously vacated by pro-Iran groups on the road to the international airport was also targeted.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes targeting Syria but has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran, which backs President Bashar Assad’s government, to expand its presence there.

“We do not comment on reports in the foreign media,” the Israeli military said after the latest strikes.

During more than a decade of civil war in Syria, Israel has launched hundreds of strikes on the country, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces as well as Syrian army positions, but such attacks have intensified since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes targeting Syria but has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran, which backs President Bashar Assad’s government, to expand its presence there.

Syrian state news agency SANA, citing an unidentified military source, said that at around 4:20 am (0120 GMT),

“the Israeli enemy carried out an air attack from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan, targeting a number of points south of Damascus.”

Air defense systems responded to the attack and downed some of the missiles, it said, reporting only material losses.

Israeli strikes in Syria earlier this week killed eight people, including pro-Iran fighters, the Observatory reported.

“Three Israeli missiles targeted a base belonging to Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the Sayyida Zeinab district” on Monday, “killing at least eight people,” Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said at the time.

A previous air strike in Sayyida Zeinab in late December, also blamed on Israel, killed a senior Iranian general.

And on January 20, a strike on Damascus’s Mazzeh neighborhood targeting the Revolutionary Guards’ Syria spy chief killed 13 people, the Observatory had said.

Since 2011, Syria has endured a bloody conflict that has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions more.

Iran says it only deploys military advisers in Syria at the invitation of Damascus.

This week’s strikes in Syria came as regional tensions soared after a drone attack Sunday that killed three US soldiers at a base in Jordan near the Syrian border.

The White House has vowed to respond to the attack, which it has blamed on Iran-backed militants.

AFP