Israel Strikes Damascus, Targeting Hezbollah Weapons Smuggler
The Israeli military struck a building in Syria’s capital, targeting what it believed to be a Hezbollah official involved with smuggling weapons into Lebanon, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday, as it expands its campaign to disrupt supply lines to the militant group.
The attack on Tuesday night hit a residential building in Damascus’s Mezzah neighborhood, according to Syrian state media. The area contains several diplomatic and government buildings, including the Iranian diplomatic complex, which Israel struck in April. Seven citizens, including women and children, were killed in Tuesday’s strike, according to Syrian state media, which reported that three missiles came from the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.
It is unclear if the target of the strike was killed.
Tuesday’s strike comes as Israel expands its air and ground offensive in Lebanon, while also signaling that it plans to involve its navy in the invasion. Israel intensified its campaign against Hezbollah in mid-September, which it says is aimed at pushing the U.S.-designated terrorist group back from its border and returning tens of thousands of displaced Israelis to their homes in the north.
Hezbollah has been firing rockets at northern Israel since Oct. 8 last year in what it has said is solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in southern Israel, which left approximately 1,200 people dead and saw around 250 taken hostage, according to Israel.
Israel’s airstrikes and its widening ground operation in southern Lebanon have displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese. The airstrikes have also widely emptied Beirut’s dense southern suburbs, one of the areas of the country Israel has hit particularly hard. Israel says it is targeting areas of the city being used by Hezbollah as military sites.
More than 2,100 people have been killed in Lebanon since the war began last year, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, including 36 on Monday. It wasn’t clear how many were combatants.
Israel also said it is reopening its offensive in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, calling on the roughly 400,000 Palestinians that the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees says are still there, to move out once again. More than 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since October last year, according to health authorities there, whose numbers don’t specify how many were combatants.
The strike in Damascus comes amid a stepped-up effort by Israel to halt Iranian shipments of weapons to Hezbollah through Syria and choke off any avenue for the Lebanese militant group to replenish its weapons caches.
Those efforts have included killing other senior Hezbollah and Iranian military officials said to be in charge of the weapons smuggling from Syria to Lebanon, airstrikes on a key land route between the two countries and threats by Israel to strike Iranian planes carrying weapons that land inside Lebanon.
For years Israel has periodically carried out strikes in Syria hitting weapons shipments destined for Hezbollah, a strategy that has become known in Israel as the “war between the wars.”
Some Israeli security experts say Israel should step up its airstrikes in Syria to press leader Bashar al-Assad to break from Iran entirely and halt the flow of weapons.
“We need to make Assad choose,” said Avner Golov, a former senior director at Israel’s National Security Council who now works for MIND Israel, a national security advisory group.
Source » msn.com
