The ruins of a building that was hit in a prior bombardment in the town of Ariha in Syria on August 28, 2020. Photo: AFP

 An Israeli airstrike in central Syria killed one Syrian soldier and three pro-Iranian fighters on Wednesday, a Britain-based war monitor said.

The Syrian state news agency SANA had earlier quoted a military source as saying that the attack near the city of Palmyra in Homs province had killed a soldier and wounded three others. 

"At around 23:34 (2034 GMT) the Israeli enemy carried out an aerial aggression... on the area of Palmyra targeting a communication tower and several positions in its vicinity," the source told SANA.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitor, said the attack targeted several Iranian positions, among them the communication tower, near the T4 airbase east of Palmyra.

It reported that the attack killed one Syrian soldier and three pro-Iranian fighters, but their nationality was not immediately clear. Seven others, among them three Syrian soldiers, were wounded. Last week, an Israeli missile strike on the same airbase killed two pro-Iranian foreign fighters, the Observatory reported. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Israel has routinely carried out air strikes inside Syria, mostly targeting Syrian government troops, as well as Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah forces allied to the Damascus regime.