DAMASCUS – Israeli strikes hit a neighborhood of the Syrian capital on Wednesday morning, killing two people and causing material damage, Syria's state TV said. There was no confirmation of the strikes from Israel.
In neighboring Lebanon, state media and security officials said an Israeli airstrike killed two people, including a young girl, triggering a rocket attack on a village in northern Israel by the militant Hezbollah group.
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Syrian state TV reported that several missiles hit the western neighborhood of Kfar Sousseh but did not elaborate or say who were the people killed. The pro-government Sham FM radio station said the strike hit a building near an Iranian school.
SANA, the state news agency, quoted an unnamed military official as saying that the missiles were fired from the direction of Syria's Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and hit a building, killing two civilians and wounding another.
Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based opposition war monitor, said the two killed were inside an apartment but did not give any clues about their identities.
He added that the strike was similar to last month's killing in Beirut of Saleh Arouri, a top official with the militant Palestinian Hamas group.
According to The Associated Press reporter on site, the strike damaged the fourth floor of a 10-story building, shattered window glass on nearby buildings and also damaged dozens of cars parked in the area. An empty parked bus for the nearby Al-Bawader Private School was also damaged and people were seen rushing to the school to take their children.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of war-torn Syria in recent years. It rarely acknowledges its actions in Syria but has previously said it targets bases of Iran-allied militant groups, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has sent thousands of fighters to support Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces.
Last month, an Israeli strike on the Syrian capital’s western neighborhood of Mazzeh destroyed a building used by the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, killing at least five Iranians.
In December, an Israeli airstrike on a suburb of Damascus killed Iranian general Seyed Razi Mousavi, a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria. Israel has also targeted Palestinian and Lebanese operatives in Syria over the past years.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said an Israeli airstrike Wednesday on the southern village of Majdal Zoun killed a woman and a child.
This came after a series of strikes overnight, including one on Safi Mountain in the Hezbollah stronghold of Apple Province and another near the southern town of Khiam.
NNA identified the woman killed as Khadija Salman, 40. Security officials speaking on condition of anonymity, in line with regulations, said the 7-year-old girl, Amal al-Dur, who was wounded later succumbed to her wounds.
Hezbollah said in the afternoon that its fighters attacked with rockets the northern Israeli village of Matsuva in retaliation.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah has been striking at Israeli posts along the border since the Israel-Hamas war broke out following the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian militants on southern Israel.
More than 200 people, the vast majority of them Hezbollah fighters, have been killed in Lebanon since the latest round of violence broke out more than four months ago. The dead include more than 30 civilians.
On Wednesday as well, Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Abdallah Bouhabib held a meeting in Beirut with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware. He said: "We ask that Israel gives peace a chance rather than going on with the policy of war.”
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Associated Press writer Bassem Mroue contributed to this report from Beirut.