Israeli strikes on government and Iran-backed forces in Syria kill 23, monitor says

BEIRUT â€”  Israel carried out airstrikes early Thursday near Damascus, wounding eight soldiers, Syrian state media said, while an opposition war monitoring group said the strikes that targeted army positions and Iran-backed fighters killed 23.

The state news agency SANA said Syrian air defenses shot down most of the missiles in the suburbs of the capital and the country’s south before they reached their targets. It said Israeli warplanes fired the missiles while flying over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and neighboring Lebanon.

SANA quoted an unnamed military official as saying that eight soldiers were wounded in the airstrikes, which damaged buildings and equipment as well.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the Syrian war through a network of activists on the ground, said the airstrikes occurred after midnight. They hit Syrian army positions and those of Iranian-backed militiamen west and south of the capital, as well as the Mazzeh air base in Damascus. the British group said.

A “large number of missiles� hit multiple positions in these areas, triggering a fire at the Scientific Research Center in the Damascus suburb of Jamraya, it said.

The human rights group said the strikes killed 23 Syrians and non-Syrian, Iran-backed fighters in the southern province of Daraa and suburbs of Damascus. It said the dead included three Iranian fighters as well as eight Syrian soldiers.

Israel does not usually comment on reports concerning its airstrikes in neighboring Syria, though it has recently acknowledged striking Iranian targets there. It did not comment on Thursday’s strikes. Iranian-backed fighters, including those of Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group, have joined Syria’s war and are fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government forces.