Deaths reported after Israeli airstrike in Syria’s Homs province

One Syrian soldier and three pro-Iranian fighters reported killed, seven others injured in attack east of Palmyra.

An Israeli airstrike in central Syria has killed one Syrian soldier and three pro-Iranian fighters, according to a UK-based war monitor.

The Syrian state news agency SANA had earlier quoted a military source as saying that Wednesday’s attack near the city of Palmyra in Homs province had killed a soldier and wounded three others.

“At approximately 23:34 (20:34 GMT) the Israeli enemy carried out an aerial aggression… on the area of Palmyra targeting a communication tower and several positions in its vicinity,” the source told SANA.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitor, said the attack targeted several Iranian positions, among them the communication tower, near the T4 airbase east of Palmyra.

The Observatory said Israeli fighter jets flew over the Iraqi- Syria-Jordan border triangle when it carried out the attack.

It reported that the attack killed one Syrian soldier and three pro-Iranian fighters, but their nationality was not immediately clear.

According to the Observatory, several other Israeli missiles were intercepted by Syrian air defences.

Seven other people, including three Syrian soldiers, were wounded.

The incident came days after Syrian state media reported that Syrian air defences intercepted an Israeli missile attack above the Homs countryside, wounding six Syrian soldiers and causing some material damage.

The Observatory reported that two pro-Iranian foreign fighters were killed in that attack.

SANA said six soldiers were also wounded in the incident.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Israel has routinely carried out airstrikes inside Syria, mostly at Syrian government troops, as well as Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah forces allied to the Damascus regime.

The Israeli army rarely acknowledges individual strikes but has said repeatedly that it will not allow Syria to become a stronghold of its arch-foe Iran.