Syria detains two leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad

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(Reuters) – Syrian authorities have detained two senior members of the Palestinian militant faction Islamic Jihad, which took part in the October 2023 attacks on Israel from Gaza, the group’s armed wing and a Syrian official said on Tuesday.

In a statement, the Al Quds Brigades said Khaled Khaled, who heads Islamic Jihad’s operations in Syria, and Yasser al-Zafari, who heads its organisational committee, had been in Syrian custody for five days.

The group said the men had been detained “without any explanation of the reasons” and “in a manner we would not have hoped to see from brothers”, and called for their release.

An official from Syria’s interior ministry confirmed the detentions, but did not respond to follow-up questions on why the pair had been arrested. A Palestinian source in Damascus also confirmed the arrests.

Islamic Jihad joined its ally Hamas, Gaza’s ruling group, in the attack on Israel in 2023. It is a recipient of Iranian funding and know-how, and has long had foreign headquarters in Syria and Lebanon.

But its allies in both countries have recently suffered devastating blows: an Israeli air and ground offensive last year severely weakened the Lebanese Iranian-backed group Hezbollah, and Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, closely allied to Tehran, was ousted by a rebel offensive last year.

The new Islamist leadership in Damascus has cut diplomatic ties with Iran and is hoping to rebuild Syria’s regional and international backing, not least to eliminate sanctions and fund reconstruction after a brutal 14-year civil war.

The U.S. has given Syria a list of conditions to fulfill in exchange for partial sanctions relief, Reuters reported last month. Sources said one of the conditions was keeping Iran-backed Palestinian groups at a distance.

Israel has carried out strikes against Islamic Jihad in Syria for years. Last month, it said it struck a building on the outskirts of Damascus that it said Islamic Jihad was using as a command centre, an assertion denied by the group.

(Reporting by Maya Gebeily and Timour Azhari in Beirut and Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Editing by Kevin Liffey)