Israel said it carried out an air raid Friday that killed up to five Iran-backed militants it said were behind a rare rocket attack from across the border in Syria.
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The official told The Guardian, “We know of at least four of them who were killed”.
The military industry called the solid-fuel missile one of the most exact ever manufactured, boasting that it has successfully hit multiple targets with great precision, Israel’s Walla website reported.
A monitoring group had earlier reported casualties.
Following the rocket attack on Israel, an Israeli army spokesperson said in a statment that “the [Israeli] army sees Syria as responsible for the fire, and it will pay the price for it”.
An Israeli drone targeted a auto in the southern province of Qunaitera Friday, killing five civilians, the latest in a series of Israeli strikes that have targeted several Syrian positions since Thursday evening, the state-run TV reported. While no group has as yet taken responsibility, Israel has blamed Islamic Jihad for the attack.
Israeli authorities said Islamic Jihad, an Iranian terror proxy like Hamas and Hezbollah, fired the rockets on northern Israel.
“Rockets earlier today were fired by Iran funded Islamic Jihad”, the IDF representative wrote on Twitter.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon both have visited the northern border this week – and both pointed fingers straight at Tehran’s funding.
Islamic Jihad denied having anything to do with the stray rockets nearly immediately, and indeed it doesn’t make a lot of sense for anyone to have “ordered” an attack on an empty field.
It didn’t immediately identify the cell’s political affiliation but said Iran’s al-Quds force, an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, had orchestrated the launch.
Netanyahu said the target of the strike included the “cell that launched the rockets and the Syrian forces that enabled the fire”.
These Israeli attacks were relatively extensive, compared to previous IDF responses to fire from Syria.
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“This is another clear and blatant demonstration of Iran’s continued and unabating support and involvement in terrorist attacks against Israel and the region in general”, the demarche said. Though it isn’t likely to become a full-scale war right now, all sides are testing their enemies’ limits, which could drag Israel further into the fighting in Syria.
