Photo: Screen capture from video purportedly showing the remains of a car hit in an alleged Israeli strike in Syria that killed regime-linked businessman Baraa Katerji, July 15, 2024.
An Israeli drone strike on a car Monday near the Lebanon-Syria border killed a prominent Syrian businessman who was sanctioned by the United States and had close ties to the government of Syria’s President Bashar Assad, according to pro-government media and an official from an Iran-backed group.
Mohammed Baraa Katerji was killed instantly in his SUV on the highway linking Lebanon with Syria, according to an official from an Iran-backed group. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Syrian businessman Mohammad Katerji who was killed in Israeli drone strike near Lebanon’s border
The pro-Syrian government newspaper Al-Watan quoted unnamed sources as saying Katerji was killed in a “Zionist drone strike on his car,” referring to Israel. It gave no further details.
Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, told The Associated Press by phone that he had no independent confirmation that Katerji was killed. He said it appeared Katerji may have been targeted because he had funded the Syrian resistance against Israel in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, as well as because of his links to Iran-backed groups in Syria.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Katerji in 2018 for allegedly working as Assad’s middleman to trade oil with with the Islamic State group and for facilitating weapons shipments from Iraq to Syria.
Katerji and his brother Hussam — widely referred to in Syria as the “Katerji brothers” — got involved in the oil business a few years after the country’s conflict began in March 2011.
For years, Israel has launched frequent strikes on targets in Syria linked to Iran, its powerful regional backer, but rarely acknowledges them. The strikes have escalated over the past five months against the backdrop of the war in Gaza and ongoing clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces on the Lebanon-Israel border.
Gaza update
Hamas said Sunday that Gaza cease-fire talks were ongoing and the group’s military commander was in good health, a day after the Israeli military targeted Mohammed Deif with a massive airstrike that local health officials said killed at least 90 people, including children.
Deif’s condition was still unclear after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday night “there still isn’t absolute certainty” he was killed, and Hamas representatives gave no evidence to back up their assertion about the health of a chief architect of the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war with militants storming into southern Israel, killing some 1,139 people — mostly civilians — and abducting about 250.
Since then, Israeli ground offensives and bombardments have killed more than 38,400 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. It does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are crammed into squalid tent camps in central and southern Gaza. Israeli restrictions, fighting and the breakdown of law and order have limited humanitarian aid efforts, causing widespread hunger and sparking fears of famine.
AP
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