Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.
VOA – A strike on a residential building in Damascus, Syria, Saturday killed four members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran said, blaming Israel.
The IRGC confirmed the deaths in a statement on Iranian media.
“The Revolutionary Guards’ Syria intel chief, his deputy and two other Guards members were martyred in the attack on Syria by Israel,” Iran’s Mehr news agency said, quoting an informed source.
Syrian state television said the building, which was destroyed in the midmorning strike, was in a neighborhood of the Syrian capital where several embassies are located.
There was no immediate comment from Israel, which rarely acknowledges its actions in Syria.
The strike came as Israel hit targets across Gaza Saturday.
Israel said it targeted militants in northern Gaza who it said were trying to plant explosives and fire missiles at Israeli tanks.
In Gaza
In Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, witnesses reported intense shelling overnight near Nasser Hospital. Israel said its troops raided a militant compound, where it found explosives and destroyed rocket launchers.
Israel vowed to destroy Hamas, which governs Gaza, after the militant group sent fighters rampaging into Israel October 7, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israel. Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and others, also took about 240 people hostage.
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported one of the largest single-day death tolls, including 165 Palestinians killed and 280 more wounded in the last 24 hours.
The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but most of the nearly 25,000 Palestinians killed since the war began are civilians, health officials say.
The unrelenting humanitarian crisis in Gaza “remains dire,” the Red Crescent said Saturday on X, formerly Twitter, “with 800,000 Palestinians grappling with a severe scarcity of essential supplies.”
Impact on women
Women have been particularly hard-hit in the Gaza crisis. Seventy percent of the nearly 25,000 people killed in Gaza have been women and children, a figure that includes two mothers per hour, according to a report issued Friday by U.N. Women, the U.N. agency for gender equality and empowerment for women and girls.
“We have seen evidenced once more that women and children are the first victims of conflict and that our duty to seek peace is a duty to them,” Sima Bahous, executive director of U.N. Women, said Friday in a statement accompanying the report.
In the West Bank
Israel arrested 22 Palestinians overnight in several locations on the occupied West Bank, including a woman and children, according to Al Jazeera. The arrests were conducted in Hebron, Nablus, Tubas, Bethlehem, Jenin and Jerusalem, it said.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club told Al Jazeera the arrests “were accompanied by widespread raids and abuse, in addition to widespread sabotage and destruction of citizens’ homes, the destruction of infrastructure, and the confiscation of money and vehicles.”
