Excerpt
Satellite images show demolished Iranian site
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed reports that the airstrike was carried out by the Israel Air Force on Friday, saying that Israel has carried out hundreds of attacks against Iranian and Hezbollah targets.
“The accumulation of recent attacks proves that we are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria,” Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.
On Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi denied that Tehran had any military bases or military presence in Syria, denying claims made by Netanyahu and former IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Gadi Eisenkot that Israel has struck hundreds of Iranian targets in Syria over the past two years.
“The Zionist War Ministry’s comments are baseless, false, misleading and is an attempt to justify their ongoing failures in the region,” Qasemi was quoted as saying by Iran’s official news agency, IRNA. He added that “the Zionists always spread lies and embark on psychological warfare to achieve their evil goals in the region. Iranian officials are in Syria strictly for consultation purposes. The Syrian government invited us in order to advise them on methods with which to fight terrorism.”
On Tuesday morning, at the ceremony marking the appointment of incoming IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, Netanyahu warned Tehran to leave Syria.
“I’m telling you, get out of there fast. We won’t stop attacking,” he said.
Syria’s SANA state news agency said that Israeli warplanes fired a number of missiles toward the Damascus area on Friday, triggering Syrian air defenses that shot most of them down.
“At 11:15 before midnight, Israeli warplanes coming from the Galilee area launched several missiles towards the surroundings of Damascus and our air defenses immediately intercepted them and downed most of them,” a military source was quoted by SANA as saying, adding that there were no casualties in the strikes, rather only “material damage to one of the ammunition warehouses.”
In late December, an Israeli strike against another Iranian weapons storehouse outside Damascus was completely destroyed. The storehouse also supposedly held Fajr-5 missiles in the Syrian regime’s 4th Division camp in the Al-Muna area.
All the views expressed in, and at the source of, this article may not necessarily reflect those of T.E.A. Watchers.
Click article heading to go to article source.