Pictures show the building in Syria’s capital razed to the ground, with emergency responders on the scene. A war monitor has reported that six people were killed in the building.

IRGC leader Mohammed Reza Zahedi was killed in the attack, security sources have reported. 

Syria’s official news agency SANA said ‘the Israeli attack targeted the Iranian consulate building in the Mazzeh neighbourhood of Damascus’.

The state news agency said that the building, an annex next to the embassy, had suffered major destruction and neighbouring buildings in the upmarket area of the city were also damaged. 

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has stepped up strikes on Iran-linked militant groups amid its Gaza war raging against Hamas since October 7.

Pictures show the building in Syria’s capital razed to the ground, with emergency responders on the scene

Iranian media also reported that the strikes in Damascus completely destroyed the annex building, and that the ambassador was unharmed.

‘Hossein Akbari, ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Damascus, and his family were not harmed in the Israeli attack,’ Iran’s Nour news agency said.

Two AFP correspondents at the site confirmed the building next to the embassy, had been razed to the ground by the strike.

Britain-based group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said ‘Israeli missiles… destroyed the building of an annex to the Iranian embassy… in Damascus, killing six people’.

Syria’s official SANA news agency earlier reported that ‘our air defence systems confronted enemy targets in the vicinity of Damascus’.

The incident came days after the Observatory reported Israeli strikes that killed 53 people in Syria, including 38 soldiers and seven members of the Iran-backed Hezbollah.

It was the highest Syrian army toll in Israeli strikes since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, said the monitor.

Since the Iranian-backed Palestinian faction Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, Israel has ramped up airstrikes in Syria against Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), both of which support the government of President Bashar al-Assad.