Israel’s air force attacked two military sites inside Syria on Wednesday evening, US military sources confirmed, marking the latest of several such covert strikes on the country’s northeastern neighbour this year. The sites are near the port city of Latakia and the capital Damascus, according to a person briefed on the matter, who said the US military believed that it was Israel that attacked. Confirmation of the attack late on Thursday followed earlier reports of sightings of Israeli jets in Lebanon and at least one explosion in Syria.
Israel’s military, which has struck targets in Syria several times this year, declined to confirm or deny that it carried out the strikes. “We never comment on foreign reports,” an Israel Defence Forces spokeswoman said. Nagham Ghadri, a member of the Syrian National Coalition, the Turkey-based opposition group, said that activists in Latakia had reported hearing a huge explosion coming from the area of Jibla, which hosts a military airport, on Wednesday. “It came suddenly, activists didn’t hear anything before it,” she said. The coastal province of Latakia is a military and political stronghold for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. There were reports that Israel previously struck an arms depot that served Syrian and Russian interests in the area in July. CNN, the US news network, on Thursday cited an unnamed official in Barack Obama’s administration who said that Israel attacked because it believed that there was “sensitive and sophisticated missile equipment” that might have been transferred to the military group Hizbollah, an ally of the Assad government. Earlier on Thursday in neighbouring Lebanon, the state news agency said that three Israeli reconnaissance aircraft had flown over its territory on Wednesday, although such violations occur frequently. During previous Israeli airstrikes on Syria, the aircraft are believed to have gone through Lebanon. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has repeatedly said that it would not allow game-changing weapons to fall into the hands of any of the warring parties in Syria or Hizbollah. In May, the IDF struck military sites near Damascus and in southern Syria, reportedly targeting Iranian-built Fateh-110 long-range missiles that were in transit through Syria to Hizbollah in southern Lebanon. In January, Israel struck a convoy of Russian SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles, western and regional sources said. Confirmation of the IDF’s strikes this year, including the one carried out on Wednesday, have all come from outside the country. Israel’s silence on its incursions into Syria have allowed it to act without publicly embarrassing Mr Assad’s government or compromising its own official stance of neutrality in the neighbouring civil war. The two countries share a border in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, where fighting has come close to the ceasefire line several times this year, and mortars and bullets have landed inside Israel, prompting the IDF to return fire.