Damascus:
Syrian air defenses intercepted Israeli missile strikes near Damascus, state media reported Friday.
“Our air defenses have stopped a number of hostile missiles in the airspace of the southern Damascus countryside,” Syria’s official news agency, SANA, said.
AFP correspondents in the Syrian capital said they heard very loud noises in the evening.
The war observer from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Israeli attacks were targeted at Iranian bases near Damascus.
The latest attack follows an attack on May 14 that killed five soldiers and another on April 27 that killed 10 fighters, including six Syrian soldiers, in the deadliest attack since early 2022, according to the Observatory.
Since the civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes there targeting government positions, as well as bases and weapons depots for allied Iranian-backed troops and fighters of the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah.
While Israel rarely comments on individual attacks, it has acknowledged that there are hundreds.
The Israeli army has defended them as necessary to prevent their nemesis Iran from gaining a foothold.
The conflict in Syria has killed nearly half a million people and displaced about half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes.
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)