Israel destroys ‘nearly all’ Iranian targets in Syria
Strike comes days after Trump quit nuclear accord, Iran launched 20 missiles
JERUSALEM — The tense shadow war between Iran and Israel burst into the open early Thursday as Israeli warplanes struck dozens of Iranian military targets inside Syria. It was a furious response to what Israel called an Iranian rocket attack launched from Syrian territory just hours earlier.
The cross-border exchanges — the most serious assaults from each side in their faceoff over Iran’s presence in Syria — took place a little more than a day after the United States withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement.
Israel’s defense minister said that Israeli warplanes had destroyed “nearly all” of Iran’s military infrastructure in Syria after Iran launched 20 rockets at Israeli-held territory, none reaching their targets.
Iran struck shortly after President Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement, raising speculation that it no longer felt constrained by the possibility that the Americans might scrap the deal if Iran attacked Israel.
Israel appeared newly emboldened as well, partly because of what seemed like extraordinary latitude from Russia, Syria’s most important ally, allowing the Israelis to act against Iran’s military assets in Syria.
Moscow did not condemn Israel’s strikes, as it had in the past, instead calling on Israel and Iran to resolve their differences diplomatically.
And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who spent 10 hours with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Wednesday, told his Cabinet on Thursday that he had persuaded the Russians to delay the sale of advanced
weapons to Syria.
Russia and Iran have been allies in the Syrian war, defending President Bashar Assad. But as the war appears to be winding down, some analysts say the aims of Russia and Iran are diverging: Moscow prefers a strong secular central government in Syria, while Tehran prefers a weaker government that would allow Iran-backed militias free rein.
Israel has conducted scores of strikes on Iran and its allies inside Syria, rarely acknowledging them publicly. But before Thursday, Iran had not retaliated, seemingly handcuffed while it awaited Trump’s decision on the nuclear accord.
Even so, the Iranians have plenty to lose if the conflict continues to grow. They still seem determined to preserve the nuclear accord despite renewed U.S. sanctions. The accord also includes Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union.
“We see now that Netanyahu feels that Iran’s capacities in Syria are vulnerable, that he can target them, that Iran’s capacities to strike back are weakened — he took out some of these capacities, probably less than he claims — and that Iran has no significant way to react without risking itself,” said Ofer Zalzberg, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Still, the rocket attack was a significant escalation in Iran’s maneuvers in the Middle East. Though Israel has hit Iranian forces in Syria with a number of deadly airstrikes, Tehran had been restrained in hitting back, until now.
“Iran had to make a point: that it can respond, even if it’s a weak response,” said Joshua M. Landis, a Syria expert and director of the Center of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “But it also revealed a weakness: Those rockets don’t have any brains.”
After the Iranian rocket assault, Israel hit back much harder. Israel said its response struck a severe blow to Iran’s military capacity in Syria. In a statement, the military said the targets included what it described as Iranian intelligence sites; a logistics headquarters belonging to the Quds Force; military compounds; munition storage warehouses of the Quds Force at Damascus International Airport; intelligence systems associated with those forces; and military posts and munitions in the buffer zone between the Syrian Golan Heights and the Israeli-occupied portion.
“If there is rain on our side, there will be a flood on their side,” Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said Thursday morning in remarks broadcast from a policy conference in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. “I hope we have finished with this round and that everybody understood.”
In all, at least 23 people were killed in the strikes, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.
The Syrian army, by contrast, said that three people had died. Israel reported no casualties on its side.
Israel said it had no intention of further escalation, and analysts looking for clues to Iran’s potential response noted that its news media was largely ignoring the overnight hostilities, focusing instead on the nuclear deal. The English-language report on the airstrikes from Iran’s Fars News Agency made no mention of Iranian involvement.
In a sign of international concern that the conflict could escalate, however, Britain, France, Germany and Russia were quick to call for calm. “We proceed from the fact that all issues should be solved through dialogue,” the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said at a news conference.
The White House condemned the missile attack on Israel, saying in a statement that it strongly supported “Israel’s right to act in self-defense” and called on Iran “to take no further provocative steps.”
It also inflicted new financial pain on Iran on Thursday.
The Treasury Department said it had teamed with the United Arab Emirates to disrupt an Iranian currency exchange network that transferred millions of dollars, in coordination with Iran’s central bank, to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. “We are intent on cutting off IRGC revenue streams wherever their source and whatever their destination,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.
Iran has taken advantage of the chaos in Syria to build a substantial military infrastructure there. It has built and trained large militias with thousands of fighters and sent advisers from its Revolutionary Guards Corps to Syrian military bases.
Netanyahu said this week that the Revolutionary Guards had moved advanced weapons to Syria, including ground-toground missiles, weaponized drones and Iranian anti-aircraft batteries that he said would threaten Israel’s military jets.
Israel’s political and security establishment has been unified and vocal in vowing to thwart Iran’s efforts to entrench itself militarily across Israel’s northern frontier and to build what Israeli and U.S. officials refer to as a land corridor from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, to Lebanon.
Israel had warned Tehran that it would respond to any attack. Israel also broadcast warnings to Syria, saying that allowing Iranian entrenchment in its territory put Assad’s government at risk.
In recent years, Iran has helped Hezbollah, the Iranianbacked force in Lebanon, amass a huge arsenal of rockets it can use against Israel as a deterrent against Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear program.