OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said Sunday ground troops had operated in southern Syria, seizing weapons and questioning individuals suspected of arms trafficking, in the latest cross-border raid since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December.
A military statement said that troops had completed overnight “a mission involving on-site questioning of several suspects involved in weapons trafficking in the Hader area in southern Syria”, near the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
“Troops entered four locations simultaneously and located numerous weapons that the suspects had been trafficking,” the statement said.
Footage released by the military showed uniformed Israeli troops in armoured vehicles and on foot operating at night.
An Israeli army division remains “deployed in the area, continuing to operate and prevent the entrenchment of any terrorist elements in Syria, with the aim of protecting Israeli civilians, and in particular, the residents of the Golan Heights”, the military said.
As an Islamist-led offensive late last year toppled Syrian president Assad, Israel deployed troops to the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights which has separated Israeli and Syrian forces following their 1973 war.
In July, Israel bombed Syrian government forces in the capital Damascus and in Sweida province to force their withdrawal from the southern region amid a wave of sectarian violence.
Israel said it was acting in defence of the Druze community, but some diplomats and analysts say its goal is to weaken the Syrian military and keep the forces of the new government away from the frontier.
Israel launched hundreds of strikes on military sites following Asaad’s overthrow in December, saying at the time it wanted to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of the new authorities it considers jihadists.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded the demilitarisation of southern Syria.
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