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Syria: Israeli airstrike kills 9 near Homs

The strike targeted a Hezbollah ammunition storage facility on the Homs-Damascus road.

By JNS

The Israeli Air Force struck targets near the village of Shinshar, located on the outskirts of Homs, Syria on Monday, Syria’s state-run SANA news agency reported.

Nine people killed and more than 10 wounded in the strikes, according to the report.

According to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is associated with the Syrian opposition, the strike targeted a Hezbollah ammunition storage facility on the Homs-Damascus road.

The alleged Israeli strike comes after Arab media reported on Sunday that Israel had killed a Hezbollah commander in Syria convicted in 2020 for the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri in 2005.

Salim Jamil Ayyashm, a senior member of the Iranian terror proxy’s assassinations unit (Unit 121), was reportedly eliminated near the Syrian city of al-Qusayr in the Homs region.

In 2020, he was sentenced in absentia to five life sentences by the U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon for his role in the assassination of Hariri, who was killed along with 21 others by a car bomb in Beirut on Feb. 14, 2005.

The U.S. State Department had offered a $10 million reward for information on his whereabouts.

Also on Sunday, Al-Arabiya reported that the head of Hezbollah’s “Golan file” had been killed in an Israeli strike in Damascus.

Ali Daqduq, known as Abu Hussein, held various operational roles with Hezbollah since 1983. In 2006, he was sent to Iraq to aid Shi’ite militias in fighting the United States.

He was captured by American forces in Basra and handed over to Iraqi authorities, who released him, after which he returned to Lebanon.

The United States believes he was involved in an attack on the Karbala Provincial Coordination Center in which five American soldiers were killed.