Israel has conducted new airstrikes on Syria’s coast and ground raids in the country’s south, part of a recent wave of attacks that Israel says are necessary for its security and that have raised tensions with Syria’s new government.
The strikes appeared to be the latest attempt to keep weapons from the deposed Assad regime out of the hands of groups that may be hostile to Israel.
The Israeli military said on Monday evening that it had targeted a weapons storage facility in Qardaha, former President Bashar al-Assad’s hometown. The town is a few miles from a major Russian air base, by the coastal city of Latakia. There were no immediate reports of casualties, according to Syria’s state news agency, SANA.
Hours later, the Israeli military conducted ground raids into two towns in southern Syria, cutting off roads and searching military barracks before blowing up warehouses and withdrawing, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group based in Britain.
The attacks came a week after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel demanded the “complete demilitarization” of much of southern Syria “from the forces of the new regime.”
Since the Assad regime was toppled in December by a lightning rebel offensive, Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Syria that it says are aimed at preventing weapons falling into what it considers potentially hostile hands.
It has also deployed forces into a U.N.-monitored demilitarized zone at its border with Syria, and invaded border villages in southern Syria, describing those moves as temporary measures to protect its own security. Many Syrians fear that the incursions could morph into a prolonged military occupation.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Shara, issued perhaps his strongest condemnation yet of Israel at an Arab summit in Cairo on Tuesday, accusing the country of violating Syrians’ rights for decades. He said that Syria remained committed to a cease-fire agreement with Israel that was signed in 1974, a deal that Mr. Netanyahu has said “collapsed” following the Assad regime’s downfall.
A number of countries have denounced the Israeli military’s incursion into southern Syria, and the United Nations said in January that Syria’s “territorial integrity, and unity must be fully restored.”
After violence broke out between Syrian government officers and armed men on the outskirts of Damascus last week, Mr. Netanyahu said that he had instructed the military to defend the country’s Druse minority from Syria’s new rulers, a move that Syrian Druse and government leaders themselves rejected.
Mr. al-Shara has repeatedly said that Syria is not seeking conflict with Israel. At a two-day “national dialogue” conference in Damascus last week that was billed as the start of a process to build an inclusive Syrian government, the closing statement rejected Israel’s threat that it would not allow the presence of Syrian armed forces in the country’s south.
It remains unclear, however, how Syria’s leadership will respond to the Israeli demand for the region’s demilitarization.
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