Israel's military fired missiles toward the international airport of Syria's capital early Monday, putting it out of service and killing two soldiers and wounding two others, the Syrian army said.
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The attack, the second in seven months to put the Damascus International Airport out of service, caused material damage in a nearby area, the army said, without giving further details. Israel has targeted airports and ports in government-held parts of Syria in an apparent attempt to prevent arms shipments from Iran to militant groups backed by Tehran, including Lebanon's Hezbollah. An opposition war monitor reported the Israeli strikes hit the airport as well as an arms depot close to the facility south of Damascus. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said four people were killed in the strike.
There was no comment from Israel. On June 10, alleged Israeli airstrikes that struck Damascus International Airport caused significant damage to infrastructure and runways. It reopened two weeks later after repairs. In September, Israeli airstrikes hit the international airport of the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest and once commercial center, also putting it out of service for days.
In late 2021, Israeli warplanes reportedly fired missiles that struck the port of Latakia hitting containers and igniting a huge fire. Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets inside government-controlled parts of Syria in recent years, but rarely acknowledges or discusses such operations. Israel has acknowledged, however, that it targets bases of Iran-allied terrorist groups, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, which has sent thousands of fighters to support Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces.
Thousands of Iran-backed fighters have joined Syria's 11-year civil war and helped tip the balance of power in Assad's favor. Israel says an Iranian presence on its northern frontier is a red line that justifies its strikes on facilities and weapons inside Syria.
Western and regional intelligence sources say Tehran has adopted civilian air transportation as a more reliable means of ferrying military equipment to its forces and to allied fighters in Syria, following Israeli disruption of ground supply.
Israel says its so-called "campaign between wars" in Syria began a decade ago, on Jan 30, 2013, with a strike against Russian-supplied SA-17 batteries that Damascus had intended to hand over to Hezbollah.
Four such strikes took place that year, but the pace had accelerated to around one a week currently, the chief of Israel's armed forces, Lieutenant-General Aviv Kohavi, said last month.
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