Two troops were killed and two others were injured in an Israeli airstrike on Damascus International Airport on Sunday night, according to the Syrian army and state news agency SANA.
According to a military source, Israel launched an airstrike at about 2:00 a.m. (23:00 GMT) with “barrages of missiles, targeting Damascus International Airport and its surroundings.”
According to the statement, the incident caused “some material losses,” the “killing of two soldiers, the injuring of two others, and the closure of the airport.”
Israel did not immediately respond with a statement.
The incident marked the second occasion in less than a year that the Damascus International Airport was shut down.
Israeli airstrikes on the airport on June 10 seriously damaged the runways and surrounding facilities.
There have also been reports of strikes at the airport in prior years.
It is believed that Iranian cargo airlines, which routinely land at Damascus International and the Tiyas, or T-4, airfield, outside of the central Syrian city of Palmyra, transfer weapons to Iran’s ally groups through Syria.
Israel has conducted countless airstrikes on targets inside of Syria’s government-controlled regions in recent years, although it rarely admits or talks about these actions. Israel has confirmed that it does attack the facilities of armed organisations with ties to Iran, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has dispatched thousands of men to bolster Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria.
The latest Israeli attack, according to Ramy Khouri, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, “by the new government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu to signal to the Iranians, Syrians and the Russians that Israel is going to maintain this policy of striking any target that it thinks is a danger to its security”.
On December 29, Netanyahu, who won a November election, took the oath of office to begin his sixth term as prime minister of Israel.
“The important thing here to remember is that the United States government, through Congress, passed laws years ago guaranteeing that Israel will be militarily superior to any combination of foes or enemies around them. So Israel has impunity to carry out attacks anywhere it wants in the region and nobody has been able to stop them,” said Khouri
