Israeli warplanes attack targets in vicinity of Damascus, across Syria
The large explosions heard in the Syrian capital Damascus on Friday night were from more Israeli air strikes, which targeted military installations near the city and in the surrounding countryside, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Syria’s capital Resul Serdar said.
The air strikes targeted the Syrian army’s Fourth Division and a radar battalion in the countryside near Damascus, Serdar said.
“There are two things interesting about this. The first is that the Fourth Division, during the al-Assad regime, it was directly under the responsibility of Maher al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s brother,” Serdar said.
Secondly, the radar battalion that was attacked is in an area where air defence systems are located, near the notorious Sednaya Prison, and which Israeli forces had already targeted with air strikes and had previously destroyed military equipment.
According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Israeli warplanes attacked a target at the summit of Mount Qasioun in Damascus, Khalkhala airport in the countryside of Sweida, and the Defence and Research Laboratories in Masyaf, located in the western countryside of Hama.
Earlier on Friday, Israeli air strikes hit six military sites in the countryside of Damascus and Sweida, the observatory said.
Israeli military releases video of operations inside Syrian border territory
Israeli military forces have carried out patrols and raids inside Syrian territory near the occupied Golan Heights where they claim to have seized weapons including antitank missiles, bulletproof vests and ammunition.
Israel’s military said tanks, engineering units and paratroopers have been deployed to “points in Syrian territory and along the border”, in what the UN has said is an incursion into a “buffer zone” between Israel and Syria, and which contravenes the UN-endorsed 1974 disengagement agreement that ended fighting between Israeli and Syrian forces.
The commander of Israel’s Golan Heights Divisional Battle Team, Brigade 474, said in comments alongside the videos that his forces were deployed in the buffer zone to protect Israeli residents of the occupied Golan Heights and cared nothing for events in Syria. “We have no interest in anything currently happening in Syria – except for carrying out the mission of protecting the residents of the Golan,” he said.
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