Israel: Syrian media reported large-scale Israeli airstrikes carried out after midnight Tuesday, targeting several sites near the Iraq border in Syria.
The attack, which allegedly targeted more than 15 Iran-linked facilities, was the fourth reported attack by Israel against Iranian bases in Syria in the past two weeks, a significant increase over the standard rate of such attacks.
According to Syria’s official SANA news agency, these strikes are targeted sites in the areas of Buakmal and Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, where the Iranian-backed militia has a significant presence. While not unprecedented, alleged Israeli attacks on targets near the Syrian-Iraqi border are unusual, given the challenges of such operations away from Israel, which are likely to target large numbers in raids.
SANA said officials were assessing whether there was any damage or any accidents.
The report came hours after Defense Minister Benny Gantz visited the Syrian border, where he said Israel would continue to take action against enemies “from near and far.”
“We are sitting around and not waiting. We are defensive, politically and financially active,” he said.
Syrian expert Omar Abu Laila, whose news organization DierAzor24 maintains researchers on the ground, reported that the Israeli attacks had led to at least 16 separate links involving Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah of Lebanon and several other Iran-backed Shiite militias. – Hit different targets.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-Syrian opposition organization, said 23 were killed in the attack, seven of them Syrian soldiers and the rest “militia fighters aligned with Iran.”
Although other news outlets in Syria reported casualties in the attacks, those figures could not be verified and were not reported by Syria’s official sources. Syria’s war analysts have regularly accused the observatory of inflaming casualty numbers, as well as inventing them wholesale.
The Israeli defense forces did not comment on the late-night attacks, which neither refused to confirm their operations in Syria nor rescued those retaliating for the attack from the country.
Israel has repeatedly hit the allegedly targeted area in recent years because it has several hideouts used by Iranian-backed groups and is the key to a land corridor to Tehran that allows Iran to travel through Lebanon to Iraq and Syria, Which Iran uses for smuggling weapons and rockets, mainly to the Hezbollah terrorist group.
The strike comes after reports from last week that Israeli jets hit targets near Damascus.
The IDF launched against Iran’s efforts to establish a permanent military presence and transport advanced, game-changing weapons to militant groups in the region, primarily since the civil war began in Syria in 2011.