A handout picture taken and released on February 19, 2023 by the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) shows a damaged building following an Israeli missile strike.
BEIRUT: Israeli airstrikes targeted a residential neighborhood in the Syrian capital of Damascus early Sunday, killing at least five people and wounding 15, Syrian state news reported.
Loud explosions were heard over a central area of the capital around 12:30 a.m. local time, and SANA reported that Syrian air defenses were "confronting hostile targets in the sky around Damascus.”
Syrian state media agency SANA, citing a military source, reported that five people had been killed, among them a soldier, and 15 civilians wounded, along with "destruction of a number of residential buildings.” The news agency also reported that the strikes had damaged buildings connected to a medieval citadel in central Damascus and an applied arts institute housed there.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based war monitor, reported that 15 people, including a woman, were killed in strikes targeting sites connected with Iranian militias and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. They took place in the Damascus countryside and on an Iranian school in the neighborhood of Kafr Sousa in the capital, it said.
Samer Abdo, an engineer living in an apartment building that was struck in Kafr Sousa on an upscale residential street, was picking through shattered glass and broken wood in his apartment Sunday morning. Abdo told The Associated Press that his family had woken up in terror to the building shaking.
"We thought at first that it was an earthquake like the one that happened two weeks ago,” he said.
Mohamad Dulo, another resident of the neighborhood, said, "All the windows fell into the street, and people ran down to the streets as well."
Dulo said he did not understand why the area was targeted. "It's a residential area,” he said. "There is nothing (military) here.”
Director General of Antiquities and Museums Mohamad Awad told the AP that the damaged buildings around the Damascus Citadel were arts and heritage institutes, as well as the offices for managing the citadel.
"It’s without a doubt that it will cost a lot to rebuild or restore some of the buildings that were destroyed in the attack,” Awad said, adding that the strike destroyed "rare and expensive” equipment and machinery that has been hard to obtain due to sanctions and the country’s economic crisis.
There was no immediate statement from Israel on the attack. A spokesperson for the Israeli military declined to comment.
