Jerusalem: An Israeli security official has confirmed responsibility for air strikes in Syria, saying the air force had hit a series of targets involved in Iranian arms transfers to the Hezbollah militant group.
Russia criticised the air strike, saying it endangered civilian flights. The comments highlighted the increasingly tense relations between Israel and Russia, which have grown strained since the September downing of a Russian plane by Syrian forces responding to another Israeli raid.
The Israeli official said the air force had attacked several Iranian targets in three main locations late on Tuesday and early on Wednesday. He said the targets were primarily storage and logistics facilities used by archenemy Iran to ship weapons to Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Lebanese group that fought Israel in a 2006 war.
He said Israel also destroyed a Syrian anti-aircraft battery that fired at the Israeli planes, and claimed that Iranian forces are operating less than 80 kilometres from the Israeli border, contrary to Russian assurances.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity under standard Israeli security protocols. The military has not commented on the incident.
Earlier on Wednesday, Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Igor Konashenkov said that six Israeli F-16 jets launched a “provocative” raid at the moment when two civilian airliners were preparing to land in Damascus and Beirut, creating a “direct threat” to the aircraft.
Read the article by Josef Federman & Nataliya Vasilyeva in The Sydney Morning Herald.