Syria intercepts Israeli missile attack: State media

Syrian air defenses intercepted Israeli missile strikes near Damascus, state media reported on Friday.

“Our air defenses stopped a number of hostile missiles in the airspace of the southern countryside of Damascus,” Syria’s official news agency SANA said.

AFP correspondents in the Syrian capital said they heard very loud noises in the evening.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said that the target of the Israeli strikes were Iranian bases near Damascus.

The latest strike follows one on May 14 that killed five soldiers and another one on April 27 which, according to the Observatory, killed 10 combatants, among them six Syrian soldiers, in the deadliest such raid since the start of 2022.

Since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes there, targeting government positions as well as bases and weapon depots for allied Iran-backed forces and fighters of Lebanon’s Shia militant group Hezbollah.

While Israel rarely comments on individual strikes, it has acknowledged mounting hundreds of them.

The Israeli military has defended them as necessary to prevent its arch-foe Iran from gaining a foothold on its doorstep.

The conflict in Syria has killed nearly half a million people and forced around half of the country’s pre-war population from their homes.