BEIRUT (Dispatches) – Syria’s health minister said Monday that overnight Israeli strikes martyred 18 people in central Hama province, updating earlier figures.
“The number of martyrs of the brutal Israeli aggression reached 18 martyrs and 37 wounded,” Syria’s Health Minister Hassan al-Ghabash said. 
This was “one of the most violent Israeli attacks” in Syria in years, the head of the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.
SANA citing a military source reported that at “around 11:20 pm (2020 GMT) on Sunday, the Israeli enemy carried out an air attack” from the direction of northwest Lebanon “targeting a number of military sites in the central region”.
Air defenses “shot down some” of the missiles, SANA reported.
Israeli strikes on Syria since 2011 have mainly targeted military positions in a knee-jerk after to prop up takfiri efforts and weaken the Arab army.  
The London-based observatory said “Israeli strikes... targeted the scientific research area in Masyaf” in Hama province and other sites, destroying “buildings and military centers”.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani told a media briefing: “We strongly condemn this criminal attack by the Zionist regime on Syrian soil.”
Syria’s foreign ministry condemned the raids, saying the occupying regime of Israel is trying to “provoke a further escalation in the region”.
 The Israeli military also ordered another evacuation of some residential areas in northwest Gaza where it said Palestinian fighters fired rockets on the nearby town of Ashkelon.
The orders issued on Monday came after a rocket attack triggered air raid sirens in Ashkelon the day before.  
The Zionist regime ordered the evacuation of all of northern Gaza, including the territory’s largest city, in the opening weeks of the war on Gaza.
Most residents heeded the orders and headed south, but up to 300,000 remained in the north, where Israel’s air and ground operations have caused widespread destruction. The north has been surrounded by Zionist forces and largely isolated since October.
Around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people have been displaced in the 11-month-old war, often multiple times. Hundreds of thousands of people are crammed into tent camps along the coast with few if any public services.
Israel’s onslaughts in Gaza have so far martyred at least 40,972 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. 

The UN human rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
In the occupied West Bank, the United Nations rights chief said, Israeli incursions are seriously worsening an already “calamitous” situation there that has been deepened by serious settler violence.
Opening a session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Volker Turk decried soaring Israeli violence in the West Bank amid major raids by the occupying regime.
“In the West Bank, deadly and destructive operations, some at a scale not witnessed in the last two decades, are worsening a calamitous situation there, already aggravated by serious settler violence,” Turk told the council.
Israel’s military on Aug 28 launched simultaneous raids across several cities and refugee camps in the northern West Bank, martyring at least 36 Palestinians, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry.
Since Oct 7, Zionist troops or settlers have martyred at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 23 Israelis, including members of the security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, Israeli officials say.
On Sunday, three Zionist guards at a border crossing between the West Bank and Jordan were shot dead by a Jordanian truck driver.
Turk also highlighted that nearly 10,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons or military facilities, “many arbitrarily”, and said over 50 have died “due to inhumane conditions and ill-treatment”.
Turk stressed that “ending that war and averting a full-blown regional conflict is an absolute and urgent priority”.