Israel says struck Syrian air defences to thwart ‘future threats’

OCCUPPIED JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said on Tuesday that its warplanes struck southern Syria overnight, targeting air defence systems and other military sites in the latest attack on the neighbouring country.

Syrian state media had said Israel hit the southern province of Daraa, with a war monitor reporting at least 17 strikes on positions of the former Syrian army, including an observation platform and tanks.

A statement from the Israeli military said its “fighter jets struck radars and detection assets used for constructing aerial intelligence assessments” as well as “command positions and military sites containing weapons and military equipment belonging to the Syrian regime”.

Since the overthrow of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in December, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes in Syria and deployed troops to a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the strategic Golan Heights.

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The Israeli military statement said that the targets hit overnight “were struck in order to eliminate future threats”.

“The presence of these assets in southern Syria posed a threat to the State of Israel and IDF (military) activities,” it said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month that southern Syria must be completely demilitarised, warning that his government would not accept the presence of the forces of the new Islamist-led government near its territory.

The latest strikes came soon after Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said world leaders should be wary of the new leadership in Syria, warning that a “fighter group” was ruling the country.

Saar’s comments were in reaction to the mass killings of nearly 1,000 civilians, many in the hands of the security forces of the new authorities or allied groups, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, in the worst violence in Syria since Assad’s overthrow.

“The international community must come to its senses. It must stop granting free legitimacy to a regime whose first acts are these atrocities,” Saar said.

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Even before Assad’s fall, during Syria’s civil war which broke out in 2011, Israel carried out hundreds of strikes in the neighbouring country, mainly on government forces and Iranian-linked targets.