Israel conducted strikes Monday targeting positions of the deposed Syrian government's army including in Damascus, the south and the coast, a war monitor said, the latest in a series of attacks since rebels took over a day earlier.

"Israeli strikes targeted military sites, including weapons depots housing anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft weapons," Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor told AFP. "Israel is deliberately destroying anything it perceives as a threat," he added.

The Israeli military said Monday that four soldiers were killed in southern Lebanon, the first deaths announced in the area since the start of a ceasefire with Hezbollah 12 days ago.

The four reservists, all from the same battalion, "fell in combat" on Sunday, the military said without giving further details.

Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said Monday that his country's military takeover of the buffer zone along its border with Syria was a "limited and temporary step".

"This is a limited and temporary step we took for security reasons," Saar said in a press conference at the foreign ministry in Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that he had ordered the army to "take control" of the zone after the fall of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad.

The Lebanese Army said one person was killed and four soldiers wounded Monday in an Israeli strike in the country's south, where a fragile ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel came into force last month.

"The Israeli enemy targeted a car near the Saf al-Hawa/Bint Jbeil military checkpoint, killing a citizen and lightly wounding four soldiers," the army said in a statement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he had ordered the Israeli military to "seize" a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone between the Israeli- and Syrian-controlled Golan Heights.

The Israeli military said Sunday it had deployed forces to a demilitarized buffer zone in southwest Syria abutting the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights after Damascus fell to rebel forces.

Israel struck Syrian army weapons depots on Sunday near the Mazzeh military airport, on the outskirts of Damascus, a war monitor told AFP.

Iran's embassy in Syria was "attacked" on Sunday, Iranian state TV said, after Islamist-led rebels declared the fall of Tehran ally Bashar al-Assad following a sweeping offensive that culminated in Damascus.

Islamist-led rebels toppled Syria's longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in a lightning offensive that a U.N. envoy called "a watershed moment" for the nation marred by civil war.

Iraqi embassy staff left Damascus on Sunday for neighboring Lebanon, a diplomatic source told AFP, after Syrian rebel forces seized the capital and declared the end of President Bashar al-Assad's rule.