11 killed as Israel conducts air strikes in Syria

JERUSALEM: Israeli warplanes carried out a “wide-scale” attack against Iranian forces and Syri a n a r my t a r g e t s i n Syri a Wednesday, killing at least 11 fighters, the Israeli army and a monitoring group said.

In a rare confirmation of their operations in Syria, the Israeli army said they had carried out dozens of strikes against the Iranian elite Quds Force and the Syrian military, in response to four rockets fired at Israel a day before. At least eleven “fighters” were killed in the strikes, said Britain-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Seven were foreigners, the group’s head Rami Abdel Rahman said, though he could not confirm whether they were all Iranian. Four civilians were also wounded, he added.

Iran has fought alongside Syrian President Bashar al-assad’s forces in the country’s eightyear civil war, heightening Israeli concern over the presence of its arch foe along its border.

“Whoever hurts us, we will hurt him,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.

“This is what we did overnight vis-a-vis military targets of the Iranian Quds Force and Syrian military targets in Syria after a barrage of rockets was launched at Israel.”

The Israeli army said they had targeted about a dozen military sites, including warehouses and military command centres.

“It was very intense,” spokesman Jonathan Conricus told AFP. The most important target, he said, was a control facility at the main international airport in Damascus. “It is the main building that serves the (Iranian) Revolutionary Guards... for coordinating the logistic facilities of transport of military hardware from Iran to Syria and from Syria onwards,” he said.