Israeli jets strike at Syria, Iran forces

JERUSALEM •Israel’s prime minister said Sunday his country delivered “severe blows” to Iranian and Syrian forces and vowed to take further action against its adversaries following the most serious Israeli engagement in Syria since the war there erupted almost seven years ago.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s tough words to his Cabinet came a day after Israel carried out a wave of airstrikes in Syria. Israel ordered the airstrikes after it intercepted an Iranian drone that had infiltrated its airspace, and an Israeli F-16 was downed upon its return from Syria.

“Yesterday we dealt severe blows to the Iranian and Syrian forces,” Netanyahu said. “We made it unequivocally clear to everyone that our rules of action have not changed one bit. We will continue to strike at every attempt to strike at us. This has been our policy and it will remain our policy.”

Israel has tried to stay on the sidelines since civil war broke out in neighbouring Syria in 2011, though it has periodically carried out airstrikes against suspected weapons shipments believed to be headed for Lebanese Hezbollah, the Iranian and Syrian-allied militant group. But as the Syrian war winds down, Israeli officials have voiced increasing alarm that Iran and its Shiite allies are establishing a permanent presence in Syria that could turn its aim toward Israel.

Israeli leaders said the airstrikes sent a clear message to Iran.

“We do not just talk, we act,” said Cabinet Minister Yoav Galant, a former Israeli deputy chief of staff and member of Netanyahu’s Security Cabinet.

“I think that also the Syrians now understand well that the fact that they are hosting the Iranians on Syrian soil harms them,” he told The Associated Press.

Saturday’s airstrikes marked the toughest Israeli aerial assault in Syria in decades. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war in Syria through a network of activists on the ground, said Sunday that at least six Syrian troops and allied militiamen were killed in the airstrikes. The six included Syrian and non-Syrian allied troops, the Britain-based Observatory said.

“They, and we, know what we hit and it will take them some time for them to digest, understand and ask how Israel knew how to hit those sites,” Israel’s Intelligence Minister Israel Katz told the Army Radio station. “These were concealed sites and we have intelligence agencies and the ability to know everything that is going on there and yesterday we proved that.”

In Saturday’s attacks, the Israeli jets came under heavy Syrian anti-aircraft fire and the pilots of one of the F-16s had to eject before the plane crashed in northern Israel.

Israel would not confirm whether its aircraft was shot down by enemy fire, which would mark the first such instance for Israel since 1982, when it was fighting a war in neighbouring Lebanon.