Iran’s generals and senior officers in Syria killed in airstrike; Tehran blames Israel, vows revenge

Suspected Israeli warplanes bombed Iran's embassy in Syria in a strike that Tehran said killed seven of its military advisers, including three senior commanders, marking a major escalation in Israel's war with its regional adversaries.
The airstrike destroyed the consulate building in the capital Damascus, killing at least seven officials including Mohammed Reza Zahedi, a top commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, and senior commander Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, according to Iran’s Foreign Ministry.
Zahedi, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards’s ground forces, air force, and the deputy commander of its operations, is the most high- profile Iranian target killed since then-US President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Revolutionary Guards General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020.
Iranian Ambassador Hossein Akbari condemned Israel for the strike. Akbari vowed revenge "at the same magnitude and harshness." Iran has asked the U.N. Security Council to hold an emergency meeting to discuss an Israeli airstrike that destroyed Iran’s consulate in Syria’s capital. Israel has carried out several hundred strikes on targets in government-controlled parts of Syria in recent years. But the number has escalated since the beginning of the nearly six-month Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza and periodic clashes between Israel’s military and Hezbollah fighters along the Lebanon-Israel border.
An Israeli airstrike in a Damascus neighborhood in December killed a longtime adviser of the Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in Syria, Seyed Razi Mousavi. A similar strike on a building in Damascus in January killed at least five Iranian advisers. Last week, airstrikes over the strategic eastern Syrian province of Deir el-Zour near the Iraqi border killed an Iranian advise