Israel hasn’t confirmed that it carried out the airstrike.
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
Five members of the terrorist group the Iranian National Guard Corps (IRGC) were killed on Saturday in an airstrike in Damascus; Israel has been held responsible and Iran has threatened revenge.
The IRGC confirmed that four key military advisors in the terrorist organization were killed and the fifth was a senior figure in its information unit.
The IRGC’s Sepah news agency named the four military advisors as Hojatollah Omidvar, Ali Aghazadeh, Hossein Mohammadi, and Saeed Karimi.
Nour News identified the dead intelligence chief as Gen. Sadegh Omidzadeh,
The airstrike took place in a residential building in the Mazzeh neighborhood of Damascus.
Syrian media as well as Iran have blamed Israel for the attack.
Israel hasn’t confirmed that it carried out the airstrike.
Hamas condemned the attack as a “heinous crime.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani released a statement reported by Iran’s state media, “Iran… reserves its right to respond to the organized terrorism of the fake Zionist regime at the appropriate time and place.”
Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi said, “The Islamic Republic will not leave the Zionist regime’s crimes unanswered.”
In late December an Israeli airstrike killed Sayyed Reza Mousavi who was a “senior advisor” in Syria and was in charge of transferring financing and logistics from Iran to Syria.
Mousavi was the closest to Qassem Soleimani the former head of the Quds Force who was killed by a US drone in January 2020.
The strike on Mousavi is the most high-profile targeted killing of an Iranian military leader since the death of Soleimani.
According to The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the strike focused on two sites linked to Hezbollah and Iranian-backed militias.
There were also reports that the Israeli airstrikes were targeting the area of Sayyidah Zainab in the Damascus countryside.
Witnesses said that they heard loud explosions and saw billows of smoke rising from the targeted locations.