Three Syrian troops injured in missile strikes, Syrian state news says, hours after reporting on deadly drone attack in same area
Israeli aircraft attacked Syrian army positions in the Golan Heights, Syrian state media said late Thursday, as tensions rose along the border following an earlier reported strike.
Helicopters fired missiles at army positions in Quneitra, and the nearby towns of al-Qataniyah and al-Hurriyet, the state-run SANA news agency said.
It said three soldiers were injured in the strikes.
There was no immediate response from Israel, which rarely acknowledges strikes conducted in Syria.
The bombings came hours after SANA reported that an Israeli drone killed one person in southern Syria’s Quneitra province, in the demilitarized zone near the border with Israel.
“A civilian was martyred when his car was targeted by a drone belonging to the Israeli enemy south of the town of Hader,” the SANA news agency reported.
The report did not specify when the alleged strike took place or identify the man.
Quoting Syrian reports, Hebrew-language media named him as Imad Tawil, a local resident who had been recruited by Lebanese terror group Hezbollah and served as a local commander for the organization.
The reports said Tawil was apparently involved in setting up “terror infrastructure” that could be used to launch attacks along the border.
Though Israeli officials generally refrain from taking responsibility for specific strikes in Syria, they have acknowledged conducting hundreds to thousands of raids in the country since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
These have overwhelmingly been directed against Iran and its proxies, notably the Lebanese Hezbollah terror group, but the IDF has also carried out strikes on Syrian air defenses when those batteries have fired at Israeli jets.
Israel has in the past accused Iran of attempting to set up rocket launching crews and other “terror infrastructure” in the Syrian Golan Heights, to be used against Israel.
An agreement with Russia was supposed to push Iranian and Tehran-backed militias, including Hezbollah, dozens of kilometers away from the border.
As reported by The Times of Israel