Israel says Iran fired rockets into Golan Heights from Syria.
JERUSALEM — Iranian forces in Syria fired about 20 rockets into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights early Thursday, targeting forward positions of the Israeli military, according to a military spokesman.
The spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, said Israel had responded to the attack but did not provide details. He said the episode was not over.
If confirmed, this would be the first rocket attack carried out directly by Iran, rather than by one of its proxies, against Israel.
Conricus said that several of the rockets had been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. He said he was not aware of any casualties and that the assessment of damage to Israeli facilities was low.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it “views this event with great severity and remains prepared for a wide variety of scenarios.”
Israel and Iran have been conducting a shadow war in Syria under the cover of that country’s civil war. As Iran has tried to build up its military capabilities inside Syria, Israel has carried out scores of strikes to try to stop it.
The rocket attack appeared to come in response to Israeli strikes on positions in southern Syria on Wednesday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that explosions rang out in Al Baath, a village in the Syrian Golan Heights, late Wednesday after it was hit by missiles from Israel. The observatory, which is based in the United Kingdom but tracks the conflict in Syria through contacts on the ground, said it did not have any information on whether anyone was killed in the strike.
Israel had been bracing for a retaliatory attack from Syrian territory after a number of deadly strikes against Iranian targets there. But analysts said the Iranians had been restrained from striking back while awaiting President Donald Trump’s decision on whether to withdraw from the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement Tuesday, and that day Israel put its troops on “high alert,” called up reservists, set up Iron Dome anti-missile batteries and warned authorities in the Golan Heights to prepare bomb shelters after detecting what it said was irregular activity of Iranian forces.
An apparent Israeli missile strike south of the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Tuesday, an hour after Trump’s announcement, killed 15 people, at least eight of them Iranians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday.
That strike, on the area of Al Kiswa, targeted facilities for the Syrian military and their Iranian allies.
Until Thursday, the biggest clashes between Israel and Iran were a series of heated exchanges in February, when Israel said it intercepted what it called an armed Iranian drone that had penetrated its airspace from Syria.
The Israeli military retaliated by sending fighter jets into Syria, one of which crashed in northern Israel after coming under heavy anti-aircraft fire. It was believed to be the first Israeli plane lost under enemy fire in decades.
Iran has taken advantage of the chaos in Syria to build a substantial military infrastructure there to counter Israel. Iran has built and trained large militias with thousands of fighters, sent advisers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to Syrian military bases, and operated drones that Israel says are armed.
Analysts say that any new conflict between Israel and Iran could mobilize Iran’s network of proxies from Syria and Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant movement is based, for a multiple-front attack on northern Israel.
Iran is building what Israeli and American officials refer to as a corridor from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon.
Iran refers to the alignment as “the axis of resistance,” and its defenders say it needs the ability to strike Israel to deter what Iran sees as an Israeli threat. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has previously advocated military strikes on Iran to destroy its nuclear program.
Israel has long accused Iran of carrying out attacks on Israeli targets outside of Israel. The most notorious was the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed at least 85 people and wounded hundreds, regarded as the worst terrorist attack in Argentina.
The Israelis also have accused Iran’s leaders of complicity in attacks targeting Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia in 2012. And they have accused Iran of involvement, through the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, of attacking a bus full of Israeli vacationers in Bulgaria in 2013.