In response to attacks toward the Golan Heights on Saturday, IAF fighter jets struck terrorist infrastructure in Syria, the IDF said early Sunday morning.
On Saturday evening, amid tensions in the North and in the wake of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s latest speech, IAF fighter jets struck targets in Lebanon, including Hezbollah infrastructure and military posts.
There had been anti-tank fire and other threats from Lebanon throughout the day, and the attack from Syria took place in the evening, with sirens sounding in the Golan Heights.
“Two launches were identified from Syria toward Israeli territory that fell in open areas,” the IDF said.
The incident in Syria was reported by Saudi Arabia-based Arab News, an English-language newspaper.
Israel struck terrorist infrastructure, the report said, including “targets in Syria on Friday after a drone launched from there crashed into a school in the southern town of Eilat… Exchanges of cross-border fire have also taken place regularly along the frontier with Lebanon, as Israel continues to press its offensive against Hamas.”
The Russian News Agency TASS also reported the strikes.
Syrian President Bashar Assad was in Saudi Arabia over the weekend for the Arab League Summit, where he met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and other leaders to discuss the Gaza war.
It was an unprecedented gathering and came five weeks after the Hamas terrorist attack that killed 1,200 people and two weeks after Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza.
Syria warned Israel about these attacks and the “recurrence of Israeli attacks on its territory, indicating that this could lead to an escalation of violence in the region in a way that would be difficult to control,” Al-Ain media in the Gulf reported.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry said Israel’s “continuation of its attacks indicates its failure and the escalation of hysteria from which it suffers due to Syria’s steadfastness in the face of all Israel’s attempts to weaken it and divert it from its position of support for the Palestinian people and their efforts to liberate their land,” the report said.
In addition to the Arab League Summit, a joint Arab-Islamic summit was being held in Saudi Arabia. Together, the joint Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting in Riyadh was very important.
Meanwhile, Nasrallah threatened on Saturday that if the war in Gaza does not end, there will be more attacks on the US, a clear link between Hezbollah and the Iranian-backed attacks in Syria and Iraq against the US.
Iran backs Hezbollah and other militias in Iraq and Syria, which it refers to as its “axis of resistance.”
As such, Nasrallah is encouraging more anti-American attacks, linking the war in Gaza against Hamas with the broader region. Iran has sought to increase threats to Israel from Syria, using these agents.
Seth J. Frantzman is the author of Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machine, Artificial Intelligence and the Battle for the Future (Bombardier 2021) and an adjunct fellow and The Foundation for Defense of Democracies.