Israeli fighter jets carry out airstrikes on Syrian capital

News Network

August 22, 2023

Damascus, Aug 22: Israeli fighter jets carried out strikes against targets in the Syrian capital Damascus shortly before midnight on Monday, wounding one soldier, Syria’s state-run media reported.

The official news agency, SANA, said Israeli Air Force warplanes launched their missiles from over the Golan Heights, targeting a number of sites in and around Damascus.

SANA said air defenses had engaged the Israeli missiles. Syria regularly claims to intercept Israeli projectiles, though military analysts doubt such assertions.

Large explosions were heard over the capital during the alleged strikes, SANA reported.

The state-run media outlet said that “material damage” was caused to the sites that were targeted, and one soldier was wounded.

In recent years, numerous Syrian soldiers serving in air defense units have been killed or wounded in airstrikes attributed to Israel.

While Israel’s military does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria, it has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country, over the last decade.

The Israeli military says it also attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups, chief among them Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Additionally, airstrikes attributed to Israel have repeatedly targeted Syrian air defense systems.

The attack would be the first alleged Israeli sortie over Syria since August 7, when fighter jets reportedly carried out strikes against targets in Damascus, killing four Syrian soldiers.

The last several months have seen increased tensions along Israel’s northern border via Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy group allied with Syrian President Bashar Assad.

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Hezbollah’s media relations chief killed in Israeli strike on Beirut

News Network

November 17,2024

An Israeli airstrike on the office of Syria’s Baath party in Lebanon’s capital Beirut has killed the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah's Media Relations Officer, Mohammad Afif, reports say.

Lebanon's National News Agency (NNA) reported that the Israeli raid struck the Ba'ath party’s building in central Beirut district of Ras Al-Naba'a on Sunday, adding that the strike was an attempt to assassinate the leader of the resistance media front.

According to Baath Secretary-General Ali Hijazi, Afif was having a meeting in the Baath Party headquarters when Israel carried out the attack.

"Afif did not fight with weapons and did not lead a military unit in Hezbollah. Rather, he led a media unit," he said.

Reuters, Sky News, Al Jazeera and a number of Henrew-language media reported that Afif was killed in the Israeli strike.

However, Hezbollah has not yet confirmed Afif’s death or whether he was present at the site or not.

Earlier, the Lebanese Health Ministry said at least one person was killed and three others injured after an Israeli strike targeted a central district in Beirut.

Lebanon's al-Mayadeen television network reported that five people were killed in the attack.

The latest development came after Afif said Hezbollah was behind the Caesarea operation and targeting Netanyahu’s home during a speech at the Ghobeiry area in the southern suburbs of Beirut on October 22.

This was the second assassination attempt on Afif in the last two months, after he survived an attack on the Hezbollah media relations office several weeks ago.

Israel launched a ground assault and massive air campaign against Lebanon in late September after a year of exchanging fire across the Lebanese border in parallel with the Gaza war.

At least 3,287 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon over the past year, with the vast majority in the past seven weeks. Another 14,222 have been wounded, mostly women and children.

In response to the ongoing aggression, the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has been staging hundreds of retaliatory strikes against the occupied Palestinian territories and the Israeli forces trying to advance on southern Lebanese areas.

The movement has vowed to sustain its strikes until the regime ends the escalation.

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