Two soldiers were killed as Israelis attacked Damascus International Airport, shutting down operations for the second time in less than a year.
The Syrian army said Israeli airstrikes had killed at least two Syrian soldiers and grounded the international airport.
A barrage of rocket-propelled grenades came from near Lake Tiberias in Israel at around 2 a.m. on Monday (23:00 GMT Sunday) and hit Damascus International Airport and its surroundings, the military said in an official statement. said the government. SANA Media Agency.
The attack caused “the death of two soldiers, the injury of two others, some casualties” and caused the airport to cease operations, the statement said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a United Kingdom-based monitoring group, reported that Israeli airstrikes hit an airport and a weapons depot near a building south of Damascus. He said at least four people died in the attack.
There was no immediate comment from Israel.
This is the second time Damascus International Airport has been shut down in less than a year.
On June 10, an Israeli airstrike on the airport caused extensive damage to infrastructure and runways.
It opened two weeks later.
Israel has also targeted other Syrian airports, including an attack in September on the international airport in the city of Aleppo, Syria’s largest, taking it out of service for the day.
Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes inside government-held areas of Syria in recent years but has neither acknowledged nor commented on such operations. However, Israel has said it is targeting the bases of armed groups allied with Iran, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has sent thousands of troops to support Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria.
Rami Khouri, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, said the latest Israeli attack could be a request “by the new government led by Benjamin Netanyahu to show the Iranians, the Syrians and the Russians that Israel will keep this .the policy of killing any person he deems to be a danger to his own safety”.
Netanyahu, who won the November election, was sworn in as Israel’s president for a sixth term on December 29.
“What is important here to remember is that the United States government, through Congress, passed a law a few years ago guaranteeing that Israel will be superior to any combination of enemies or enemies around them. So Israel has no impunity to attack wherever it wants in the region, and no one can stop them,” Khouri said.
“The Israelis and the Russians, who have allied with Syria and fought in Syria to keep the Assad regime in power, have an understanding that Israel can attack some positions in Syria, but they should not prevent the operation of the Russian military in “There,” he said. adding that this means that such attacks will continue in the future.
Monday’s attack comes a few days after the head of the Israeli army, Major General Oded Basiuk, presented the military’s operational expectations for 2023.
“We see that our action in Syria is an example of how the war continues to be persistent and leads to the formation that affects the whole region,” Basiuk’s presentation said, according to the tweet of the Israeli army .
“We will not accept Hezbollah 2.0 in Syria,” he said.
