Click to see full-size image
On June 1st, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that it had destroyed a Syrian regime observation post established on the Israeli side of the buffer zone in the occupied Golan Heights.
The army “destroyed a forward observation post of the Syrian army that was set up in an Israeli area west of the Alfa line in the Golan Heights,” spokesman Avichay Adraee wrote on Twitter.
#فيديو للمرة الثالثة خلال العام الأخير: جيش الدفاع يدمر نقطة مراقبة للجيش السوري انتهك من خلالها السيادة الإسرائيلية.
لقد أقدمت قوة من جيش الدفاع على تدمير نقطة المراقبة الأمامية للجيش السوري والتي أقيمت في منطقة إسرائيلية غربي خط ألفا وسط هضبة #الجولان pic.twitter.com/TdS0TMUTAR— افيخاي ادرعي (@AvichayAdraee) June 1, 2021
The report said the IDF had deliberately used ground forces instead of targeting the site from the air in order to send a message to Syria and Hezbollah that Israel would not tolerate any violations of its sovereignty over occupied territories.
Channel 13 showed footage of the troops going in and planting the explosives. Officers told the channel the posts were allegedly also used by Hezbollah fighters and pro-Iranian militias.
“We vaporized it,” one officer told the TV.
Back in 1967, Israel had captured large swathes of Syria’s Golan Heights during the Six-Day War. The territory has been occupied since then.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the beginning of the conflict there in 2011, mostly targeting Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah forces as well as Syrian government troops, though it rarely acknowledges them.
Its military has said it had hit some 50 targets in 2020 alone.
Israel says it is trying to prevent Iran, which has been one of the Syrian government’s key allies in the decade-old civil war, from gaining a permanent military foothold on its doorstep.
In early May, Syrian state media and a war monitor said Israel had carried out air strikes in the southern Syrian province of Quneitra, near the border with Israel.
Syria’s state news agency SANA said there had been “an Israeli attack led by a helicopter in one of Quneitra’s zones” not far from the border with Israel.
MORE ON THE TOPIC:
