Two soldiers were injured and damaged in Israel’s latest airstrikes near the Syrian capital.
Israel has been conducting airstrikes on targets in the Damascus area, with loud explosions being heard over the capital around 1:20 a.m. local time (22:20 GMT), the Defense Ministry and state media reported.
State news agency SANA said Syrian air defenses “faced hostile targets” in the early hours of Thursday morning, the Associated Press reported.
State media, citing a military source, said Israel fired “a series of rockets” from the Golan Heights towards the area around Damascus, wounding two soldiers and causing “some material damage”.
Syrian air defenses confronted the missiles and “shot down some of them,” the source added.
“Around 01:20 (10:20 GMT), the Israeli enemy launched an airstrike from the direction of the occupied Golan Heights, targeting several positions near Damascus,” the Syrian Defense Ministry later said.
The ministry did not specify the targets, saying the strikes injured two soldiers and caused material damage.
Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes on targets in government-controlled parts of Syria in recent years, including two rocket attacks this month on Aleppo International Airport, marking the third attack by Israeli forces on the airlift facility in six months.
This satellite photo released by Planet Labs PBC shows the damage after an Israeli attack on Aleppo International Airport in September 2022. The Israeli attack tore a hole in the runway and also damaged a nearby section of tarmac and a structure on the military side of the airfield [File: Planet Labs PBC via AP]Israel rarely acknowledges its attacks on sites in Syria, which it claims are targeting bases of Iran-aligned armed groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah, which has dispatched thousands of fighters to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the broken-out to support the Syrian civil war in 2011.
The Israeli attack on Aleppo airport last week shut down the facility for two days. Since a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck southern Turkey and northwestern Syria on February 6, killing more than 50,000 people, including more than 6,000 in Syria, Aleppo International Airport has been a crucial conduit for the flow of humanitarian aid into the country.
A group monitoring the Syrian civil war said last week’s Israeli missile strikes destroyed a suspected arms depot used by Iran-backed militants at Aleppo airport. On March 7, three people were killed in the Israeli airstrike on the airport, which also halted air traffic for three days
In addition to airports, Israeli warplanes have also attacked other critical infrastructure, including Syrian seaports.
Israel says such operations are aimed at preventing Iranian weapons from reaching Tehran-backed armed groups in Syria.
Nearly half a million people have been killed in Syria’s civil war, and about half of the country’s pre-war population has been displaced from their homes.