Airstrikes kill 44 in Syria and Lebanon

Airstrikes near the northern Syrian city of Aleppo early Friday killed a number of soldiers, Syria’s state news media and an independent organization reported, in what appeared to be one of the biggest Israeli attacks in the country in years.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that tracks the war in Syria, said that the overnight strikes killed at least 44 people — at least 36 Syrian soldiers, seven members of the Lebanese group Hezbollah and one member of a pro-Iranian militia — and that the toll could rise. The group said the attack appeared to have hit multiple targets, including a weapons depot belonging to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia that also has a presence in Syria.

Israel’s military did not immediately comment on the strikes, but it has previously acknowledged carrying out hundreds of assaults on Iran-linked targets in Syria. Iran supports and arms a network of proxy militias that have been fighting with Israel, including Hamas — whose political leader was in Iran for high-level meetings this week — and other Palestinian groups.

Attacks across borders have escalated since Israel’s intense aerial bombardment and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack, in a sign of the rising tensions in the region.

The Israeli military said this month that its forces had struck more than 4,500 Hezbollah targets in Syria and Lebanon in that time period, assaults that it said had killed over 300 Hezbollah members, although that could not be independently confirmed. Hezbollah’s official website and spokesperson said that “more than 200” of its fighters had been killed to date.

On Friday, Syria’s state-run official news agency, SANA, did not specify a death toll in what it identified as an Israeli attack but said that several civilians and soldiers had been killed or wounded in strikes on multiple locations near Aleppo around 1:45 a.m.

Separately, the Lebanese state news media reported that an Israeli drone strike had targeted a car on a road in southern Lebanon, killing at least one person.

The Israeli military confirmed that it had carried out the strike in Lebanon, which it said had killed the deputy commander of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile unit. Hezbollah acknowledged the death of Ali Abdulhassan Naim, the man the Israeli military said it had killed, on its Telegram channel but did not elaborate on the circumstances of his killing.

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, praised “another successful assassination of a Hezbollah commander” and appeared to hint at responsibility for the strike in Syria in a post on social media.

“We will pursue Hezbollah every place it operates and we will expand the pressure and the pace of the attacks,” he said, promising more operations in Lebanon, Syria and “in other more distant locations.”

The Israeli military and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire across their border for months, displacing tens of thousands of Lebanese and Israelis from their homes.

On Thursday, the United Nations peacekeeping mission deployed along the Lebanese border with Israel said in a statement that it was very concerned about the surge in violence, which has killed many civilians and destroyed homes and livelihoods.

Israel has also targeted Hamas officials outside Gaza, most notably assassinating Saleh al-Arouri, a top Hamas leader, in early January in an explosion in a Beirut suburb, officials from Hamas, Lebanon and the United States said at the time. Israel did not take responsibility for his killing.

Since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war in 2011, Israel has conducted strikes and targeted killings in the country, which Israeli officials have said are aimed at crippling the military capabilities and supply lines for Iranian-backed proxy forces, including Hezbollah.

Friday’s attack was at least the second deadly attack in Syria in less than a week. On Tuesday, airstrikes in eastern Syria killed several people. The Iranian state news media said that Israel was responsible, while the Syrian state news agency attributed it to U.S. forces. A Pentagon spokesperson denied that the United States had carried out those strikes.

The Tuesday strikes killed a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, according to Iranian state news media reports. An engineer with the World Health Organization was also killed in the strikes, the agency said in a statement.