CAIRO / AMMAN (Reuters) – Israel bombed targets in southern Syria on Wednesday, in the third attack of its kind in nearly ten days, state television said, while army defectors said that the missiles targeted the Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases.
A military spokesman said that missiles flying over the Golan Heights targeted several sites and that the air defenses dropped several missiles. Live coverage showed a multi-storey building in flames.
“Our air defenses responded to an Israeli air aggression … against some targets in the southern region,” state media quoted a Syrian army spokesman as saying.
Two military defectors said the strikes hit the Kiswah area on the southern outskirts of the capital, Damascus, and military bases used by the pro-Iranian Lebanese Hezbollah group.
There was no immediate comment from an Israeli military spokesman, but IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi said last month that the missile strikes “slowed Iran’s entrenchment in Syria.”
“We have hit more than 500 targets this year, on all fronts, in addition to many secret missions,” Kohavi said in statements published in Israeli media.
Bases in eastern, central and southern Syria that Israel has bombed in recent months are believed to have a strong presence of Iranian-backed militias, according to intelligence sources and military defectors familiar with the sites.
Western intelligence sources say that Israel’s escalation of strikes on Syria in the past few months is part of the shadow war approved by the United States and part of the anti-Iran policy that in the past two years has undermined Iran’s vast military might without provoking a major offensive. An increase in hostilities.
They say that the past year has seen an expansion of Israeli targets across Syria as thousands of Iranian-backed militias took part in reclaiming a large portion of the territory that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had lost to the rebels in a nearly decade-long civil war. .
(Coverage of Alaa Sweilam and Omar Fahmy in Cairo, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, and Dan Williams in Jerusalem, edited by Leslie Adler and Grant McCall)
