Israel launches fresh attacks on Syrian site hoarding weapons, killing six soldiers

Israeli forces launched a series of attacks on Syrian sites outside the capital city of Damascus, Syria’s state-run news agency said on Thursday.

Quoting a government source, state-run news outlet SANA said that Israel has struck a site near Kisweh, the location that already came under attack just a day earlier. The Syrian Foreign Ministry has said that the bombings have killed six soldiers.

According to Syrian reports, soldiers had found “surveillance and eavesdropping devices” in the area before it was hit by Israeli strikes on Tuesday.

A defence ministry official told AFP on condition of anonymity that the site was a former Syrian military base in Tal Maneh, near Kisweh.

Following the second attack on Wednesday, SANA said that Israeli troops were flown into the area to carry out a raid, “the details of which are not yet known, amid continued intensive reconnaissance flights”.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a network of sources on the ground, reported that the site had weapons used by Iran-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, one of former Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad’s main allies.

The Observatory said the Israeli ground raid was the first of its kind since the fall of Assad in an Islamist-led rebel offensive in December.

In a statement, Syria’s foreign ministry called the strike “a gross violation of international law and the United Nations Charter”.

It added that the attack represented “a clear breach of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic”.

Since the fall of former leader Bashar al-Assad in December, Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on military sites and assets across Syria. It has also expanded its presence in the Syrian Golan Heights by taking control of the demilitarised buffer zone, a move that breaches the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria.

With inputs from agencies