Israel has unleashed a barrage of aerial attacks across Syria, battering key military sites amid a security vacuum after opposition forces ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
Near the port city of Latakia, Israel targeted an air defence facility and damaged Syrian naval ships as well as military warehouses. In and around the capital, Damascus, strikes targeted military installations, research centres and the electronic warfare administration.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a war monitor, said Israel had “destroyed the most important military sites in Syria, including Syrian airports and their warehouses, aircraft squadrons, radars, military signal stations, and many weapons and ammunition depots in various locations in most Syrian governorates”.
Israel, which borders Syria, sent troops into a buffer zone on the east of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights
after al-Assad’s fall, in what Foreign Minister Gideon Saar described as a “limited and temporary step” for “security reasons”.
It has also carried out “about 250 air strikes on Syrian territory” over the last 48 hours with the aim of destroying the former regime’s military capabilities, according to SOHR.
Israel media, quoting a senior security source, described the attacks as the largest air operation carried out by its Air Force in its history.
Geir Pedersen, the UN’s special envoy for Syria, has called on Israel to end its ground operations and bombing raids in Syria, calling them “very troubling.”
“We are continuing to see Israeli movement and bombardments into Syria,” he said in Geneva on Tuesday. “This needs to stop. This is extremely important.”
Pederson described the various groups now in power in Syria as being in coordination after al-Assad’s flight. “It is important that we don’t see conflict between these groups,” he said. (Agencies)
