Israel hits Iranian targets in Syria as shadow war bursts into open
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.
Diverging interests
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 Russia President Vladimir Putin 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.
Iran’s rocket attack against Israel came after what appeared to have been an Israeli missile strike against a village in the Syrian Golan Heights late Wednesday.
‘Rain and flood’
Early Thursday, Iranian forces fired about 20 Grad and Fajr-5 rockets at the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, targeting forward positions of the Israeli military, according to an Israeli military spokesman. The barrage was launched under the command of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and used Iranian weapons, said the Israeli spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus.
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.