At least 42 soldiers of the Syrian government forces and members of the Lebanese Shiite group Hizbullah were killed this Friday in a series of bombings carried out by Israel against several positions in the province of Aleppo, in northern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. The NGO said in a statement that 36 Syrian soldiers and six Hizbullah fighters were killed in the attacks, which targeted a Shiite group’s missile warehouse near Aleppo’s international airport, as well as other facilities used by the allied formation in Damascus.
According to the Observatory, based in the United Kingdom but with a wide network of collaborators on the ground, this is the Israeli attack that has left the most dead on Syrian soil in the last three years.
For its part, a military source told the official Syrian news agency SANA that the attack took place around 1:45 a.m. local time on Friday (22:45 GMT on Thursday), when “the Israeli enemy launched an aerial attack from Athriya, southeast of Aleppo” that caused the death of an unspecified number of “civilians and military personnel.
This same Friday, a drone attack on a car traveling on a road near Bazouriye, in southern Lebanon, killed Ali Abed Akhsan Naim, a deputy commander of Hizbullah’s rocket and missile unit, the Israeli army announced. “He was one of the leaders of the Iranian-backed militia in launching rockets with heavy warheads and responsible for carrying out and planning attacks against Israeli civilians,” Israel specified.
The multi-pronged offensive comes a day after Israel attacked the outskirts of Damascus and wounded at least two civilians, according to the Syrian Defense Ministry, in an action that took place just ten days after another carried out by the Jewish state against Syrian territory.
The Observatory then stated that the target were weapons warehouses of Hizbullah, which Israel has been confronting on the Israeli-Lebanese border since last October and against whom it has been carrying out parallel attacks in Syrian territory.
Although they have already taken place relatively frequently before, Israel has intensified its actions against Syria since the start of the Gaza war on October 7 and often targets pro-Iran militias present in the country as allies of the Syrian government.
So far this year, the Jewish State has attacked Syrian territory 28 times, most of them by air, according to the Observatory.
