Israeli airstrikes targeted Iran-linked arms warehouses east of Aleppo late Monday night, according to a war monitor, as Syrian media claimed it had intercepted the Israeli missiles.
It was not immediately clear if there were casualties in the raids.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, the sites were defense factories run by Iranian forces and Iran-backed militias.
The raids caused “violent explosions” in the area, according to the Britain-based monitor.
Minutes later, warplanes hit positions of pro-Iran militias in the Mayadeen desert in eastern Syria, according to the Observatory.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible but the Observatory said it was “likely” to be Israel.
Syrian state media said Israeli missiles targeting a research facility in northern Syria were intercepted, adding that it was the fourth such attack in two weeks.
“Syrian air defenses intercept an Israeli aggression on a research center in Aleppo province,” the official SANA news agency said.
Citing a military source, SANA later said the intercepted missiles targeted several “military depots” in the Al-Safira area southeast of Aleppo city.
There was no immediate comment from the Israel Defense Forces, which rarely comments on individual cross-border raids.
Monday night’s attack appeared to be the sixth strike attributed to Israel against Iran-linked forces in Syria in the past two weeks.
The reports came after Israel bombed a munitions warehouse in central Syria on Friday morning in a rare daylight strike which sparked a massive explosion, according to reports from Syria.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said the arms cache that was bombed on Friday morning by Israel was located outside Homs and contained missiles and ammunition belonging to the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group.
Damascus officially denied that Israel was responsible for the explosion, saying it was the result of “human error” while transporting munitions, Syrian state media outlet SANA reported. This was widely seen by defense analysts as an attempt to cover-up yet another Israeli strike on Syrian soil.
A top Iranian official has repeated his threat to “raze Israeli cities to the ground” if the Jewish state takes any action against the Islamic Republic, hinting that Tehran could attack even in retaliation to US military action, in the tense aftermath of the killing earlier this year of Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani.
“If the Zionist entity takes even the slightest initiative, you may rest assured that we will raze the Israeli cities to the ground,” Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s powerful Expediency Council, told Qatar’s Al-Jazeera network in an April 28 TV interview translated and published Sunday by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
Rezaei said that in the immediate aftermath of Soleimani’s killing in a January 3 airstrike in Iraq, “Tel Aviv was not the issue at hand — we had to deal with America.”
But if the US makes “another mistake,” Iran could “carry out the other parts of our retaliation,” he said, an apparent reference to targeting Israeli cities.
Rezaei, also a former leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, is considered a top adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It was not the first time Rezaei has threatened to destroy Israeli cities.
In February, he warned that Iran was just looking for an excuse to attack Israel and “raze Tel Aviv to the ground,” blaming Israel for allegedly helping the US kill Soleimani.
“Iran’s revenge against America for the assassination of Soleimani will be severe… Haifa and Israeli military centers will be included in the retaliation,” he said in January.
Following the Iranian attack on the US base and repeated Iranian threats, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Iran against attacking Israel.
“We’re standing steadfast against those who seek our lives. We’re standing with determination and with force. Whoever tries to attack us will receive a crushing blow in return,” Netanyahu declared in a January conference in Jerusalem.
Also during his interview, Rezaei repeated an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory voiced previously by himself and other Iranian officials, claiming that the novel coronavirus is a man-made biological weapon manufactured by the US to target Iran.
“So far, this possibility has not been refuted,” he said when asked about his previous remarks on the matter.
“The virus is smart and unnatural,” he added. “It is man-made. It is different from natural viruses like SARS and others. Therefore, there are still suspicions out there.”
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