MISSILE STRIKE ON SYRIAN CAPITAL DAMASCUS KILLS 5

At least five people were killed early Sunday during missile strikes on Damascus, the Syrian state news agency said, in what appeared to be the latest salvo in a yearslong shadow war between Israel, Iran and Iranian proxies like Syria.

The Syrian news agency, SANA, attributed the attack to Israel and said the missiles came from the direction of the Golan Heights, an area that Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and later annexed.

A spokesperson for the Israeli army declined to comment, but Israel has acknowledged hundreds of past attacks on Iran-linked targets in Syria.

Since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Iran and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, its ally, have increased their military support for Syria’s authoritarian president, Bashar Assad. In an effort to limit the influence and military buildup of these forces, and their potential threat to its northern border, Israel regularly strikes government-controlled areas in Syria.

The strikes early Sunday were believed to be targeting Iranians near a site used by the Iranian military, according to a senior Western diplomat briefed on the episode. Israeli news outlets, citing unnamed sources, said some of the damage, in a residential area called Kafr Sousa, may have been caused by a misfired Syrian air-defense missile.

There were no confirmed reports of Iranian deaths.

Israeli airstrikes on Syria are one part of a wider, largely clandestine conflict between Iran and Israel that also takes place at sea, online and in Iran itself, where Israel has repeatedly tried to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, which it fears it will be the target of one day.