BEIRUT: Israeli missile strikes on the Syrian capital’s airport on Monday killed four people including two soldiers and closed the runways for several hours, a rights monitor said.
This is the second time in less than seven months that Damascus International Airport — where Iranian-backed armed groups and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters are present — has been hit by Israel.
The attack around 2:00 am (23:00 GMT) put the airport out of service until 9:00 am (06:00 GMT), Syria’s state news agency SANA and officials said.
Israel carried out the strike with “barrages of missiles targeting Damascus International Airport and its surroundings”, a military source told SANA, which reported that two Syrian soldiers were killed and two others wounded.
But the Britain-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a wide network of sources on the ground in Syria, said “four fighters including two Syrian soldiers were killed”.
The missiles also hit “positions for Hezbollah and pro-Iranian groups inside the airport and its surroundings, including a weapons warehouse”, said Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the Observatory.
Flights later resumed after repairs of “the damage caused by Israeli aggression”, Syria’s transport ministry said in a statement.
“Air traffic has returned after we restored work on one of the runways, while the process of repairing the second runway continues,” transport ministry official Suleiman Khalil told AFP.
Since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes against its neighbour, targeting government troops as well as allied Iran-backed forces and fighters from Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hezbollah.
The Israeli army, which said on Monday that “it does not comment on foreign reports”, has repeatedly said it will not allow its archfoe Iran to gain a foothold in Syria.
On December 28, the head of the Israel Defence Forces Operations Directorate, Major General Oded Basiuk, presented the military’s “operational outlook” for 2023, where he said that the force “will not accept Hezbollah 2.0 in Syria”, the army said on Twitter. “Our course of action in Syria is an example of how continuous and persistent military action leads to shaping and influencing the entire region,” Basiuk added. — AFP
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