Israeli air strikes have destroyed the Iranian embassy’s consular annex in Damascus, Syria, killing seven members of the Revolutionary Guards and prompting a reprisal threat from Tehran.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi and another high-ranking officer, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, were among the dead.

Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 11 people were killed when Israeli missiles struck the building.

The toll includes “eight Iranians, two Syrians and one Lebanese — all of them fighters, none of them civilians,” Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Observatory with a network of sources in Syria, told Agence France-Presse.

Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, told Iranian state TV that the attack “was carried out by F-35 fighter jets” that fired six missiles at the building.

Akbari vowed the attack “will lead to our decisive response.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Tuesday summoned the Swiss embassy’s chief of mission, who serves as representative for the US in lieu of an American diplomatic mission in Tehran.

As Israel’s main backer, “the Americans must take responsibility,” Amir-Abdollahian said, according to state news agency IRNA.

Building destroyed

Syria’s defense ministry said that “the attack destroyed the entire building, killing and injuring everyone inside, and work is underway to recover the bodies and rescue the wounded from under the rubble.”

AFP reporters saw the annex building had caved in, and emergency services were searching for victims under the rubble as sirens wailed in the upscale Damascus district of Mazzeh.

Only the gate of the building was left standing after the attack, with a sign reading “the consular section of the embassy of Iran.”

Windows had shattered within a 500-meter radius and many parked cars were damaged by the blast.

The targeted building is next to the Iranian embassy, the front of which is decorated with a large portrait of Qassem Soleimani, the architect of Iran’s military operations in the Middle East who was killed in a United States drone strike in Iraq in January 2020.

The Damascus strikes were the fifth in a week to hit Syria, whose President Bashar al-Assad is supported by Iran, Israel’s long-time arch-foe in the region.