Russia on Tuesday said Israel was behind a series of airstrikes on targets in Syria on Monday morning, adding that those attacks threatened to destabilize the region.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said six Israeli fighter jets operating inside Lebanese airspace conducted the predawn raid, which reportedly targeted Iranian and pro-Iranian positions in the country, specifically those tied to the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah and other Shiite terror groups in the region.
Israel has refused to comment on the attack, which came less than a week after a trilateral summit with Russia and the United States concerning Tehran’s activities and military presence in the region.
The airstrikes reportedly targeted at least a dozen sites in Syria, outside the cities of Damascus and Homs, in the largest attack of its kind since last May, when Israel squared off against Syria and Iran in a massive nighttime battle in response to a rocket attack by Iranian troops on Israeli military positions on the Golan Heights.
Sixteen people were reportedly killed during Monday’s strikes, including six civilians, though Syrian media said it was not clear if they were killed by the incoming Israeli missiles, attempts by the Syrian military to intercept them or some kind of secondary blast. The other 10 fatalities were members of pro-Iranian groups, most of them non-Syrians.
“We are concerned about this alarming development of the situation,” Zakharova said in a press briefing.
“Force actions that grossly violate the sovereignty of Syria, not only do not contribute to the normalization of the situation in this country, but also carry a threat of regional destabilization,” she said, in response to a question about the strikes.
On Monday evening, a private Israeli intelligence firm, ImageSat International, identified one of the sites in Syria targeted in an alleged Israeli airstrike earlier in the day as a hangar likely storing advanced weaponry or other military equipment.
The firm released a photograph of the hangar, located at the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in Jamraya, outside Damascus.
Yossi Cohen, the head of the Mossad intelligence service, said Monday that Israel “can’t agree to Syria becoming a staging ground for Iranian forces or forces operated by it against us. We can’t agree to Syria becoming a logistics base for transferring weapons to Hezbollah and Lebanon.”
Cohen did not refer specifically to the strikes earlier that day, but acknowledged that Israel often conducted military activities in Syria.
“Israel has taken action in the past four years, overtly and covertly, about which only a small amount has been published, in order to block the entrenchment and the production lines of precision-guided munitions,” he said.
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