Syrian media reports 16 dead from Israeli airstrikes. War monitoring claims more casualties

Syrian state media said on Monday that overnight Israeli strikes killed 16 people in the central province of Hama, while a war monitor reported a higher death toll in “intense” raids on military installations.

The Israeli military, which has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the civil war began in 2011, declined to comment on the latest reported attack.

Syria’s official SANA news agency, citing a medical source, said the death toll “in the Israeli attack on a number of sites on the outskirts of Masyaf” was “16 martyrs and 36 wounded, including six in critical condition,” updating an earlier account 14.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported “intense Israeli strikes” overnight, providing an updated death toll of 25, including “five civilians, four soldiers and intelligence personnel and 13 Syrians working with pro-Iranian groups.”

Three more bodies were unidentified, the Observatory added.

Israeli strikes in Syria since 2011 have mainly targeted army positions and Iranian-backed fighters, including the Lebanese Hezbollah group.

Israeli authorities rarely comment on individual strikes in Syria, but have repeatedly said they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in the country.

The Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria, had earlier said the strikes targeted sites “where pro-Iranian groups and weapons development experts are stationed”.

The Observatory said “Israeli strikes … targeted the scientific research area at Masyaf” in Hama province and other locations, destroying “buildings and military centers”.

Syria’s SANA news agency, citing a military source, said that “around 11:20 p.m. on Sunday, the Israeli enemy carried out an air strike” from the direction of northwestern Lebanon “targeting a number of military sites in the central region.”

Air defenses “shot down some” of the missiles, SANA said.

It was “one of the most violent Israeli attacks” in Syria in years, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

He said Iranian experts “developing weapons, including precision missiles and drones” worked at the scientific research center that was hit.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani told a news conference: “We strongly condemn this criminal attack by the Zionist regime on Syrian soil.”

Syria’s foreign ministry condemned the raids, accusing Israel of trying to “cause further escalation in the region”.

Israeli raids in Syria increased after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, then eased somewhat after the April 1 strike blamed on Israel hit the Iranian consular building in Damascus.

Syria has sought to stay out of the Israel-Hamas conflict, which has raised fears of a wider regional war.

In late August, several pro-Iranian fighters were killed in Syria’s central Homs region in raids attributed to Israel, the Observatory said.

Days later, the Israeli military said it had killed an unspecified number of fighters belonging to Hamas’s ally Islamic Jihad in an attack in Syria near the border with Lebanon.

The Syrian government’s brutal crackdown on a 2011 uprising sparked a conflict that has killed more than half a million people and attracted foreign armies and jihadists.

Iran-backed groups, including Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah movement, bolstered President Bashar al-Assad’s forces during the Syrian civil war.

Israeli strikes in Syria also sought to cut off Hezbollah’s supply routes to Lebanon.