CAIRO / AMMAN (Reuters) – Israel hit targets in southern Syria on Wednesday in the third attack in nearly 10 days, state TV reported as military defectors said the missiles were targeting Iranian revolutionary guard bases.
A military spokesman said that missiles flying over the Golan Heights hit several locations and air defenses shot down several missiles. The live coverage showed a multi-storey building on fire.
“Our air defenses responded to an Israeli air assault … on some targets in the southern region,” said state media quoting a Syrian army spokesman.
Two military defectors said the attacks hit the Kisswa area in the south of the capital, Damascus, and military bases used by Lebanon’s pro-Iranian group Hezbollah.
There was no immediate comment from an Israeli military spokesman, but Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Force, Aviv Kochavi, said last month that the missile strikes “slowed Iran’s entrenchment in Syria”.
“We hit more than 500 targets this year, on all fronts, in addition to several clandestine missions,” said Kochavi in comments published in the Israeli media.
The bases in the east, center and south of Syria that Israel has reached in recent months have a strong presence of militias supported by Iran, according to intelligence sources and military defectors familiar with the locations.
Western intelligence sources say Israel’s attacks on Syria in recent months are part of a secret war approved by the United States and part of the anti-Iran policy that has undermined Iran’s extensive military power over the past two years without triggering a huge increase hostilities.
They say that last year there was an expansion in the targets hit by Israel across Syria, where thousands of Iranian-backed militias were involved in the recovery of much of the territory lost by Syrian President Bashar al Assad to insurgents in a civil war of almost a decade.
(Reporting by Alaa Swilam and Omar Fahmy in Cairo and Suleiman al Khalidi in Amman and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Editing by Leslie Adler and Grant McCool)