Israeli army strikes Iranian targets inside Syria | News from the world

A second night of Israeli airstrikes hit targets inside Syria as part of an exchange of fights including the launching of a medium-range missile from the suburbs of Damascus to the Golan Heights occupied by Israel.

The sharp rise in tensions between Israel and Syria, and its main support, Iran, comes at a time when the security situation in Syria is changing rapidly due to the recently announced withdrawal of US troops and the bidding war. influence of all parties.

The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, based in the United Kingdom, said 11 people had been killed, including Iranians, after heavy explosions were heard Monday morning. Russia, an ally of Syria, has announced the death of four Syrian soldiers.

Israel has recognized a much more prominent role in the war in Syria in recent weeks, after years in which it has conducted thousands of largely unrecognized raids.

This month, Israeli army chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot said that Israel had carried out thousands of strikes against Iranian interests in Syria. These remarks were followed by the public disclosure by Netanyahu, two weeks ago, of a strike near Damascus – a brutal break with Israel's ambiguous policy.

The social media video caught the surreal moment on Monday as skiers descending from Mount Hermon on the Golan Heights saw an Israeli missile battery intercept a missile.

Syrian media, citing a military source, said the country had suffered a heavy attack from consecutive waves of guided missiles, but had destroyed most of the "hostile targets."

Although the threat of a direct confrontation between Israel and Iran has long reigned in Syria – where the Iranian army established its presence at the beginning of the civil war to help Bashar al-Assad – the latest outbreak took place in a potentially dangerous moment.

On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who for a long time has been leading a bellicose rhetoric against Iran, faces the threat of indictment – possibly as early as February – of corruption charges and elections April.

In the meantime, Iran is working to consolidate its presence in Syria even as the civil war has taken an increasingly decisive direction in the direction of the Assad regime, not least because the recent measures taken by the government Trump are perceived as leaving the void.

Continuing this trend, an Israeli army spokesman said on Monday that the targets hit included a facility belonging to the al-Quds force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and that the latest strikes were aimed at responding to the launch of the ground-to-ground missile launched by al-Quds of Syria on Sunday.

"We considered that it was an unacceptable attack by Iranian troops – not proxies, neither Shiite militias, nor Syrian forces – Iranian troops firing a missile manufactured by the Iranian army. Iran near the sovereign Israel, "said army spokesman Jonathan Conricus.

Israel would be targeted, among other things, at ammunition depots, a site at Damascus International Airport allegedly the main al-Quds logistics center in the country, an Iranian intelligence facility and an Iranian military training camp.

Netanyahu said on Sunday: "We have a permanent policy: to attack the Iranian rooting in Syria and to harm anyone who tries to harm us."

Some have hinted that the slight rise in strikes was intended to redress Netanyahu's security credentials ahead of the April 9 elections, but others say it is also pursuing a strategic military objective.

"If you want to clearly indicate to the other party that you are determined to prevent something, you can either step up the operation – more targets, more sophisticated – or tell you in public" I do it ", which means "I am willing to take the risk," said the former Israeli adviser to the National Security, Yaakov Amidror. "Israel, instead of climbing, decided to make it public."

However, badyst Avi Issacharoff said in a Times of Israel column, "The Syrian rocket fire is probably best understood as an Iranian attempt to create a new balance of power on the Israeli-Syrian front, in order to generate the waiting for an Israeli attack in Syrian territory will provoke firing on Israeli territory. In other words, it was a new effort to create deterrence against Israel. "

As a sign of the increasingly warlike rhetoric of recent days, Tehran's Air Force Chief, General Aziz Nasirzadeh, said that Iran was "quite ready and eager to confront the Zionist regime and eliminate it from the Earth, "according to Young Journalists. Club, a website supervised by Iranian television.

Reuters contributed to this report