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Israel’s military has expressed its regret after a Tehran synagogue was damaged by a missile strike earlier Tuesday.
The Israel Defense Forces said it had received reports indicating a nearby synagogue had been affected.
The military said that it had targeted a senior commander in the Khatam al-Anbiya emergency headquarters, which is used by Iran’s armed forces. The IDF said that it had taken steps to mitigate harm to civilians prior to the strike.
The damage to the synagogue came on the eve of the end of Passover, the Jewish festival celebrating the exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery in 1200s BC.
Earlier Tuesday, CNN geolocated images and video footage published by Iranian outlets which showed extensive damage to the Rafi Niya synagogue, with books containing Hebrew scripture lying amid the rubble.
The synagogue is “one of the religious centers of Tehran’s Jews dating back to the Pahlavi II era,” Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) reported, saying it was “completely destroyed in an airstrike.”
Before the 1979 revolution, there were some 60,000 Jews in Iran, according to Adyan Iran, a website that documents religious minorities in the country and which is linked to the activist outlet IranWire. That number has since dropped to just under 10,000, according to the latest census in 2016.
CNN’s Billy Stockwell, Oliver Sherwood and Nadeen Ebrahim contributed to this post.
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