MOUNT BENTAL, Golan Heights — The Israeli military said it had struck dozens of Iran-linked military targets in Syria on Thursday in response to rocket fire, marking a significant escalation in regional hostilities a little more than a day after the U.S. withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal.
Israel said the attacks followed a volley of rockets directed at Israeli positions in the Golan Heights, which caused no casualties.
The Israeli military blamed the attack on Iran’s Quds Force, a special forces unit affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and said this marked the first time that Iranian forces have fired directly on Israeli troops.
The rocket fire was followed by Israel’s largest intervention in neighboring Syria in decades. Jets headed for Syria screamed over northern Israel for more than four hours. and about 70 previously identified targets were hit, according to the Israeli military
In a statement carried by Syria’s state news agency, an unidentified Syrian Foreign Ministry official described Israel’s overnight attacks as a “new phase of aggression.”
“This was by far the largest strike we have done, but it was focused on Iranian sites,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman. Syrian anti-aircraft batteries were also targeted after they fired on Israeli planes, he added.
From a viewing point on Mount Bental on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, he pointed out where he said an Iranian rocket salvo was fired toward Israel just after midnight. Four of the 20 rockets were on target, he said, but were then intercepted, while the rest fell short.
“We saw it was very clear what the Iranians were doing, attacking Israel from Syrian soil,” he said.
Israel and Iran have been on an increasingly inevitable collision course in Syria in recent months, as Israel has vowed not to let Iran build a presence there and has escalated attacks against Iranian targets across the border. Iran threatened retaliation after seven of its soldiers were killed by an Israeli airstrike in April.
Israel officials have downplayed a link between the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the immediate escalation in tensions, though Israelis on the Golan Heights were ordered to open their bomb shelters at the very moment Trump made his announcement.
Before the United States made its decision about the nuclear accord, Iran faced a “strategic uncertainty” over what would happen and did not want to take the risk of striking back, said Michael Horowitz, a senior analyst at Le Beck International, a Middle East-based geopolitical and security consultancy. “That encouraged Tehran to be careful.”
Israel, meanwhile, was searching for an opportunity to escalate its efforts at rolling back the entrenched Iranian presence in Syria, he said.
On Tuesday night, Israel had struck targets in Syria after detecting what Israeli officials said were suspicious military movements, reportedly killing a further eight Iranians.
Horowitz said Israel’s strategy is two-fold. In part, Israel wants to delay Iranian entrenchment in Syria as much as possible and make sure it comes at the highest cost possible. At the same time, Israel is trying to back up its diplomatic efforts aimed at getting Russia and the United States to rein in Iranian expansionism.
In Washington, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders condemned Iran’s “provocative rocket attacks from Syria against Israeli citizens” and supported Israel’s “right to act in self-defense.”
“The Iranian regime’s deployment into Syria of offensive rocket and missile systems aimed at Israel is an unacceptable and highly dangerous development for the entire Middle East,” Sanders said in a statement. “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) bears full responsibility for the consequences of its reckless actions.”
The statement called on Iran and its proxies “to take no further provocative steps.”
It was a sleepless night for residents of Damascus. “The intensity of the blasts and their repetition was stressful,” said one resident, who declined to be named for security reasons. He said he was not fearful, but many of those close to him were. “They said that a war with Israel would be much scarier than a war with other proxies,” he said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, said at least 23 people were killed in Thursday’s Israeli strikes across Syria. It said five Syrian soldiers and 18 allied militiamen died, without specifying whether any of the militiamen were Iranian. The Syrian army, however, said only three people died in the strikes and claimed that most of the Israeli missiles were intercepted.
Russia, meanwhile, issued its own analysis of the attack, saying it was carried out by 28 Israeli fighter jets firing 60 missiles and another 10 surface-to-surface missiles, with Syrian air defenses intercepting half of them.
There were no immediate statements from the Iranian government after the Israeli strikes. On Wednesday, however, Iran’s defense minister, Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami, pledged that Iran would continue to develop its missile capabilities. Hatami, speaking to officials in Tehran, made no direct mention of Israel or other nations, but cited pressures from “enemies of Iran,” according to Iran’s Fars News Agency.
Tehran’s strong support for Assad has allowed it to deepen its foothold across Syria, but Iranian media downplayed Tehran’s role in the violence, depicting the clashes instead as between Israel and Syria.
[The shadow war between Israel and Iran takes center stage]
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said the strikes targeted “almost all of the Iranian infrastructure in Syria.”
An army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ronen Menalis, said Israel could inflict much more damage if it deems further strikes necessary.
“What we did tonight is only the tip of the iceberg of the Israeli army’s capability,” he said Thursday morning on Israel Army Radio.
Among the targets that were hit were a logistics headquarters belonging to the Quds Force, a military logistics compound in Kiswah, an Iranian military compound north of Damascus, munition storage warehouses of the Quds Force at the Damascus International Airport, intelligence systems and posts associated with the Quds Force, observation and military posts and munitions in the buffer zone, the Israeli army said.
Speaking at the annual Herzliya Conference on Thursday morning, Liberman said his country’s position was clear: “We will not allow Iran to turn Syria into a front-line post against Israel.”
On the Golan Heights, captured by Israel from Syria half a century ago, air raid sirens sounded shortly after midnight on Thursday. Residents have been used to them sounding during errant fire in the civil war, but things were a little different this time said 33-year-old Maayan Ben Dor, a resident of Neve Ativ.
“It does make you stressed,” she said. “It’s not Hezbollah or Hamas, it’s something else.”
Eglash reported from Herzliya, Israel, and Loveluck from Beirut. Suzan Haidamous in Beirut, Erin Cunningham in Istanbul and Brian Murphy and John Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.
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