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Beirut (AFP) – Six fighters, including Syrian soldiers, were killed by Israeli shelling early Thursday, targeting sites belonging to pro-Iranian forces near Damascus, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in an attack that is the fourth of its kind this month.
Israel rarely confirms strikes in Syria, but it reiterates that it will continue to counter what it describes as Iran’s attempts to entrench its military presence in Syria.
The observatory reported that Israeli missile strikes targeted sites and warehouses belonging to pro-Iranian forces in the vicinity of Damascus International Airport. It also targeted an air defense system within the area between al-Kiswah and Sayyida Zainab, south of Damascus.
According to the observatory, the bombing caused the death of six people, two soldiers and four fighters loyal to Iran, whose nationalities have not yet been determined.
The official Syrian News Agency (SANA) had earlier quoted a Syrian military source as saying that three soldiers were killed as a result of “the Israeli enemy’s implementation of an air aggression with rockets from north of Lake Tiberias, targeting some points in the vicinity of the city of Damascus.”
And the official media reported that the air defense media “repelled the aggression’s missiles and shot down most of them.”
There was no official comment from Israel. And only an Israeli army spokesman said, “We do not comment on reports in the foreign media.”
This is the fourth time that Israel has launched air attacks inside Syria this month, as part of its ongoing military campaign against forces loyal to Iran.
The attack came at dawn on Thursday after an Israeli missile strike targeted at dawn on Wednesday points in the vicinity of the city of Quneitra in southern Syria, without causing any casualties.
On February 17, Israeli missile strikes targeted military points near Damascus, according to the official media. A Syrian soldier was also killed and five wounded in an Israeli air and ground bombardment that targeted military sites in the vicinity of Damascus on the ninth of this month.
Israel said at the time that it was in response to a missile fired at it from Syria.
“A threat”
During the past years, Israel launched hundreds of air strikes in Syria, targeting Syrian army sites, Iranian targets, and Hezbollah targets, the most prominent military and political force in Lebanon, supported by Tehran.
Iran is Damascus’s main regional ally, and since the conflict began in 2011, it has provided it with political, economic, and military support.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech last week that the Israeli bombing of Syria aimed at “disrupting” his party’s transfer of weapons from Iran “posed a threat.”
But at the same time, he declared that his party now possesses the “technological ability to convert our missiles into precision missiles.” “Today, we are in Lebanon, and for a long time we have started to manufacture rallies,” he added.
On Friday, the Israeli army announced that its air defenses had fired at a drone coming from Lebanon that had entered Israel’s airspace, in the second incident of its kind in two days.
For its part, Hezbollah said in a statement that it had launched the drone, which “roamed the targeted area for forty minutes on a reconnaissance mission that extended for a length of seventy kilometers.”
Syria has been witnessing a bloody conflict since 2011, which has caused the deaths of nearly half a million people, caused massive damage to infrastructure, and led to the displacement of millions of people inside and outside the country.
© 2022 AFP