Israel appears to have carried out a strike on a building next to the Iranian Consulate in Syria, killing top members of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terrorist apparatus. The strike sends an unmistakable signal to Iran, whose proxies are waging open war on the Jewish state. Tehran has sworn revenge and further escalation seems likely.
The strike on Monday killed seven people, including two top generals from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force: Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his deputy, Mohammad-Haji Rahimi.
Zahedi was a big fish, the highest-ranking IRGC operative in both Lebanon and Syria. The strike comes at an important time. The Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas and other Iranian-backed, Gaza-based proxies sent Israel reeling. And while Israel has since launched an extensive air and ground campaign in Gaza, the security situation on its northern borders remains tenuous at best.
For months, IRGC-backed proxies in Lebanon and Syria, most notably Hezbollah, have launched missiles into Israel, killing several Israelis and sparking the mass evacuation of tens of thousands of others. Hezbollah has failed to come fully to Hamas’s aid, however. Instead, Hezbollah and other IRGC-supported elements have chosen to wage a low-intensity war on the Jewish state. Indeed, mere hours before the strike in Damascus, an Israeli naval base in Eilat was hit by a drone attack from an Iran-backed base in Iraq.
By taking out Zahedi, Israel not only eliminates a top terrorist operative but signals that any Iranian escalation in the north will be met with a response that isn’t confined to certain borders. Unsurprisingly, Iran decried the strike. Hossein Akbari, the regime’s ambassador to Syria, vowed that Tehran would respond with “the same magnitude and harshness.”
Nevertheless, Tal Beeri, the head of research for the Alma Center, a think tank that focuses on Israel’s north, noted: “There is no doubt that the location of the attack is unique, but as soon as a building next to the embassy becomes a military headquarters from which planning and command of operations against Israel are carried out, the target immediately becomes a legitimate target, no different than a militarized hospital in the Gaza Strip.”
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Israel’s enemies have long used schools, hospitals, and other civilian population centers to plot and launch attacks. But it seems likely that Iran will respond. And the United States isn’t helping. As Axios’s Barak Ravid reported, the White House was quick to tell Iran that “it had no involvement” in the strike.
In a tough region like the Middle East, the quick disavowal is likely to be interpreted as a sign that the U.S. fears an Iranian response on its own personnel. Such weakness is provocative and only continues to chip away at America’s eroding deterrence.
The writer is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
