Iranian and Hezbollah targets in the vicinity of Damascus came under attack.
By Erin Viner
The regime-run SANA news agency reported that Israeli missiles appeared over the skies of the Syrian capital at 11:45 PM Sunday night.
Citing a Syrian military source, state media said the strikes were launched from the direction of the “Israeli-occupied Golan Heights” had targeted several sites it did not identify.
“Our air defences confronted the aggressors’ missiles and downed some of them with only material losses,” said the military source.
While authorities said no one was injured during the bombardment and only material damage was sustained at unspecified sites. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, however, reported there were 5 Syrian casualties and extensive damage to Hezbollah and Iranian infrastructure.
Iran’s proxy militias, led by Hezbollah, now control large areas of eastern, southern and northern Syria and in several suburbs around Damascus.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit neither confirmed or denied involvement in the latest attack – although Israeli officials have previously acknowledged mounting hundreds of attacks on Iranian-linked targets in Syria from which the Islamic Republic and its proxies have tried to attack neighboring Israel over the last decade, repeatedly stating that Iran’s presence just over the northern frontier will not be tolerated.
“There is a clear policy of preventing Iran from entrenching in Syria, from building an infrastructure that threatens Israel, a terrorist infrastructure that seeks to turn the quiet Golan Heights border into a war-fighting border,” Security Cabinet Minister Israel Katz said while speaking to Army Radio.
Iranian leaders have frequently threatened to annihilate the Jewish State.
The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has never publicly acknowledged that Iranian forces operate on Syrian soil, claiming Tehran only has military advisors on the ground to help battle insurgents in the civil war that has raged since 2011.
Western intelligence sources say the Islamic Republic has stepped up aerial weapons shipments to its terrorist proxies, including Hezbollah, in attempts to evade IDF strikes on overland ground convoys amid Israel’s escalation to eliminate Iranian-linked targets inside Syria as part of the “shadow war” between the two arch-foes. Research centers for weapons development and munitions depots operated by IRGC have particularly been in the IDF’s crosshairs.