Israeli fighter jets bombarded sites in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Thursday that the military said were affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed militia, killing at least 15 people, according to Syrian state media.
The Syrian state news agency, SANA, said Israel struck the al-Mezzeh neighborhood in Damascus around 3:20 p.m. local time. The attack damaged buildings and wounded 16 people, including women and children.
In a statement, the Israeli military said the attack had “inflicted significant damage” to a Palestinian Islamic Jihad command center in the neighborhood. It blamed the Syrian government for allowing the militia to operate from its territory.
For years, Israeli warplanes have quietly launched attacks in Syria in an effort, the military says, to prevent Iranian proxies like Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from operating there. Israel generally declines to comment on individual strikes, but over the past several weeks, Israeli officials have increasingly taken responsibility for the attacks.
“We are conducting deep strikes and striking frequently in Syria and along the Syria-Lebanon border to prevent weapons transfers to Hezbollah,” Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, said on Tuesday.
The Biden administration and other mediators are attempting to broker a cease-fire in the yearlong conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. They hope that a diplomatic settlement could help to end Israel’s campaign against Hamas, another militant group backed by Iran, and bring back the hostages held in Gaza.
Hezbollah began firing on Israel the day after the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, saying its bombardment was a sign of solidarity with its Gaza-based ally.
Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, on Wednesday said that any agreement to end the fighting must force Hezbollah to disarm and withdraw from areas near the Israeli border. Israel has also demanded that it must be able to crack down on Hezbollah should it violate the deal.
Hezbollah has so far given little indication that it would be willing accept those demands. While the group has been battered by the war, it is still managing to put up a fight, firing scores of rockets and drones into Israel daily and killing six Israeli soldiers on Wednesday in southern Lebanon.
In the meantime, the fighting has continued. On Thursday, Israel continued its days-long barrage of the area south of Beirut, the Lebanese capital.
Lebanon’s state news media said the strikes were concentrated in two neighborhoods of the Dahiya, a previously densely populated area that has been a frequent target of the Israeli military since it stepped up its air war in Lebanon at the end of September.
The offensive began after almost a year of near-daily cross-border rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Israel that forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes in northern Israel.
On Thursday, Israel’s military said that it had killed a large number of Hezbollah fighters over the past week and had “struck and dismantled” more than 140 Hezbollah rocket launchers in southern Lebanon.
It also said it had intercepted several drones launched at Israel, some toward the country’s north and at least one other toward the southern city of Eilat. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which is also backed by Iran, claimed responsibility for four drones that had been aimed at northern Israel. There were no reports of damage from the drone attacks.
In Gaza, Israel pressed ahead with a weekslong offensive in the northern part of the territory, which it says has become the locus of a Hamas resurgence. The military said on Thursday that it had launched airstrikes and ground raids over the past day, killing Hamas fighters there.
Israel’s offensive in northern Gaza has drawn international criticism for its heavy toll on civilians, several hundred thousand of whom became trapped there when the operation began last month, according to United Nations agencies. Tens of thousands have since fled their homes.
On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released a report that accused Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity for forcing nearly all of Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians to flee their homes, and often advising them later to move from the places where they had sought shelter. Israel has said it warns residents to evacuate for their own safety.
“There is no plausible imperative military reason to justify Israel’s mass displacement of nearly all of Gaza’s population, often multiple times,” the report said. “Rather than ensuring civilians’ security, military ‘evacuation orders’ have caused grave harm.”
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