Illustrative image. (The Israeli Defense Forces)
Two senior leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in a wave of Israeli strikes that hit the Syrian capital, Damascus, earlier this week, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported on November 16, citing a source from the group which has been fighting alongside Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The unnamed source told AFP that Abdel Aziz Minawi, a member of Islamic Jihad’s political bureau, and the group’s foreign relations chief Rasmi Abu Issa were killed in the city of Qudssaya close to Damascus.
The same source said the strike, targeting a building housing one of the group’s offices in Syria, also killed another Islamic Jihad member.
The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said that 15 people were killed and at least 16 others were wounded in the strikes, which hit buildings in Qudssaya and the Mezzeh district in the capital. However, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based pro-opposition monitoring group, put the death toll from the strikes at 23.
13 people, including civilians and Iran-backed fighters, were killed in a strike on Mazzeh, the monitoring group said, adding that the strike on Qudssaya killed at least ten members of the Islamic Jihad.
The Israeli Defense Forces acknowledged the strikes on Damascus at the time, saying that it hit buildings belonged to the Islamic Jihad.
Israel has escalated its attacks on Syria since the outbreak of the war in Gaza last October, targeting Syrian military sites as well as personnel of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and other factions of the so-called Axis of Resistance.
After expanding operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon in September, the IDF said that it will work to prevent the supply of any weapons from Iran to Hezbollah through the Lebanese-Syrian border.
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