Israel Carried Out Deadly Strike in Damascus, Syrian State Media Says

Airstrikes targeting a residential neighborhood in and around Damascus, Syria’s capital, killed several people and damaged residential buildings, Syrian state media and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported early on Sunday.

The Syrian state media agency, SANA, and the observatory said that Israel had carried out the bombing. Israel, which has conducted hundreds of strikes on targets in government-controlled areas of Syria in recent years, did not immediately respond to the accusations.

Reuters, citing witnesses and an official source, said a missile had hit a building in an area near a large security complex close to Iranian military installations.

In the past, Israel has acknowledged targeting the bases of Iran-allied militant groups, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has supplied fighters in support of the troops of Syria’s authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad.

Reports of the number of dead and injured in the area, Kafr Sousa, varied.

SANA, citing a source in the Damascus police command, said that at least five people had been killed and 15 others injured after loud explosions were heard over the capital around 12:30 a.m. local time. It said that Syrian air defenses were “confronting hostile targets in the sky around Damascus.”

The observatory, based in Britain, said in a post on Twitter that 15 people had been killed “in an Israeli bombing.”

The strikes were the first since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6, killing a total of more than 40,000 people.

Video shared by Syrian journalists and others on social media showed what they described as damage to buildings from the strikes. SANA, citing sources, said the strikes had come from the direction of the Golan Heights.

The last previous attack on Damascus known to have taken place was on Jan. 2, according to The Associated Press, when the Syrian Army reported that Israel’s military had fired missiles toward the city’s international airport, killing two soldiers, wounding two others and putting the airport out of service.

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.