Airstrikes Reported South of Damascus Leave Two Dead, Syria Blames Israel

BEIRUT (Reuters) —
IDF troops in the Golan Heights, on the Syrian border. (Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)

A Syrian military source said that an Israeli missile attack on Syria killed two people, injured seven others and caused damage on Monday, state media reported.

The state news agency SANA cited the source as saying that Syrian air defenses had intercepted most of the Israeli missiles launched from the direction of the Golan Heights toward military sites south of Damascus.

SANA later said a civilian woman had been killed and her husband injured in the blast. It was not immediately clear if she was among the two deaths initially reported by the military source, who had said that seven soldiers were wounded.

An IDF spokesman declined to comment on the initial report by Syrian state media of an Israeli air strike.

Last month Israeli aircraft attacked targets in Syria in what it described as retaliation for an attempted bombing of a fence along the Golan armistice line between the two countries by what Israel described as an enemy squad.

Israel has repeatedly attacked Iranian targets in Syria and those of allied militias, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Israel sees Iran’s presence in Syria, in support of President Bashar al Assad’s government in the country’s civil war, as a strategic threat.

In the past three months alone, Syria has accused Israel of carrying out at least eight air raids on its territory. In recent months, Israeli officials have also expressed concern that Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese terror group that operates in Syria, is trying to establish facilities to produce precision-guided missiles. Tensions have also risen along the Israel-Lebanon border.

 

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