Syria says soldier wounded in Israeli airstrikes on Damascus

Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent.

Israeli fighter jets carried out strikes against targets in the Syrian capital Damascus shortly before midnight on Monday, wounding one soldier, Syria’s state-run media reported.

The official news agency, SANA, said Israeli Air Force warplanes launched their missiles from over the Golan Heights, targeting a number of sites in and around Damascus.

SANA said air defenses had engaged the Israeli missiles. Syria regularly claims to intercept Israeli projectiles, though military analysts doubt such assertions.

Large explosions were heard over the capital during the alleged strikes, SANA reported.

The state-run media outlet said that “material damage” was caused to the sites that were targeted, and one soldier was wounded.

In recent years, numerous Syrian soldiers serving in air defense units have been killed or wounded in airstrikes attributed to Israel.

While Israel’s military does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria, it has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country, over the last decade.

The Israeli military says it also attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups, chief among them Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Additionally, airstrikes attributed to Israel have repeatedly targeted Syrian air defense systems.

The attack would be the first alleged Israeli sortie over Syria since August 7, when fighter jets reportedly carried out strikes against targets in Damascus, killing four Syrian soldiers.

The last several months have seen increased tensions along Israel’s northern border via Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy group allied with Syrian President Bashar Assad.

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