Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Wednesday that Israel would “be slapped” after an airstrike on a building in Damascus killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members, two of them generals.

“The defeat of the Zionist regime in Gaza will continue and this regime will be close to decline and dissolution,” Khamenei said in a speech to the country’s officials in Tehran.

“Desperate efforts like the one they committed in Syria will not save them from defeat. Of course, they will also be slapped for that action,” he added.

Israel has not publicly commented on or claimed responsibility for the attack, which destroyed a building adjacent to the main Iranian embassy complex in the Syrian capital. Tehran has claimed the building was an Iranian consular annex. However, the US, backed by British and French officials at the United Nations, on Wednesday maintained that the circumstances of the strike need to be clarified.

Though it was blamed by Iran and its allies, Israel has not officially commented on the Damascus attack, which killed Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the IRGC’s most senior official in Syria, along with his deputy Gen. Mohammad Hadi Hajriahimi, five other IRGC officers and at least one member of Hezbollah.

Zahedi was reportedly responsible for the IRGC’s operations in Syria and Lebanon, for Iranian militias there, and for ties with Hezbollah, and was thus the most senior commander of Iranian forces in the two countries. The IRGC is a US-designated terrorist organization.

In an online statement, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi also blamed Israel for the attack, saying the “cowardly crime will not go unanswered.”

“After repeated defeats and failures against the faith and will of the Resistance Front fighters, the Zionist regime has put blind assassinations on its agenda in the struggle to save itself,” his statement added.

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