The death toll from a series of airstrikes in northwestern Syria last night attributed to Israeli aircraft rose to 14 on Monday, while the number of wounded now stands at 43, the official Syrian news agency SANA reported.
The campaign of airstrikes against the town of Masyaf and its surroundings caused the death of 14 people, the director of the National Hospital of the city told SANA, Faisal Haidar, who added that six of the injured are in "critical" condition.
According to the official Syrian version, the Jewish state bombed several military positions, although the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that pro-Iranian militias allied to Damascus and a regular target of Israel in Syria were present at the points attacked.
At least four rounds of airstrikes hit the region in a span of about three hours, targeting facilities housing experts from Tehran-backed militias believed to be responsible for weapons development, the NGO said in a statement.
The attacked area houses the notorious Center for Scientific Research and Studies (known as ESRB, from its French acronym), which according to Israeli sources is used by Iranian forces to manufacture precision-guided surface-to-surface missiles.
According to the UK-based Observatory, which has a wide network of collaborators on the ground, floating structures on the Syrian coast were also attacked, among others.
Although it has done so frequently before and does not usually claim responsibility, the Jewish state has intensified its bombings against Syrian territory since the beginning of the war against Hamas in Gaza last October.
These actions are often directed against targets of Iranian and pro-Iranian militias present in Syria as allies of Damascus, including the Lebanese Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, against which Israel has also been fighting directly across its border with Lebanon for more than ten months.
On Thursday, an unknown drone struck a truck carrying weapons believed to belong to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard outside the town of Al Bukamal in eastern Syria, near the border with Iraq, according to local organizations.
Such actions have been attributed in the past to Israel, which in recent months has also, according to foreign reports, carried out several targeted attacks on vehicles on the highway between Damascus and Beirut.
The last of these occurred at the end of August, when three members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and one member of Hezbollah were killed near the western village of Al Sabboura. Aurora and EFE