“We are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria,” the prime minister declared at the beginning of the Sunday cabinet meeting.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
At the start of Sunday’s cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Syrian media reports over the weekend accusing Israel of bombing their capital’s airport.
“Just in the last 36 hours, the air force attacked Iranian warehouses with Iranian weapons at the international airport in Damascus,” the prime minister stated. “The accumulation of recent attacks proves that we are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria, just as we promised.”
The Syrians filed a formal complaint Saturday with the United Nations Security Council over the attack on a “Ministry of Transport warehouse” at the Damascus airport late Friday night. Netanyahu clarified that the airstrike was part and parcel of the Jewish state’s ongoing efforts to stop Iran’s military from setting up a permanent presence in close proximity to Israel.
The prime minister was speaking in the context of thanking retiring Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot for all his success in leading the IDF action against the Iranian threat.
“The IDF – under your command – worked with exceptional cooperation with all of the security arms – the ISA, Mossad, Israel Police and other bodies,” Netanyahu said. “We worked with impressive success to block Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria. In this framework, the IDF attacked Iranian and Hezbollah targets hundreds of times.
“We worked together against the manufacture of precision weapons in Lebanon,” Netanyahu continued. “We worked to dismantle Hezbollah’s tunnels weapon in Lebanon, in Operation Northern Shield. We took action against Hamas tunnels on the Gaza border. We thwarted hundreds of terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria and we carried out very many other actions, open and covert. The IDF has major achievements under your command. We yet have much work to do and we will do it.”
In fact, the IDF uncovered and demolished the sixth Hezbollah attack tunnel on Saturday afternoon, after which it announced completion of Operation Northern Shield.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights publicized on Saturday that “two areas hosting military positions of Iranian forces and the [Iranian-backed] Lebanese Hezbollah movement” had been the targets, with the Hezbollah site being missile depots in the Al-Kiswah neighborhood of the capital.
Syrian military sources told the SANA news agency that the country’s air defenses had intercepted many of the missiles launched towards Damascus “and downed most of them.” Despite their alleged success, the foreign ministry still turned to the U.N. to accuse Israel of being “no different” than the Islamic extremist organizations fighting the Syrian regime in their years-long civil war, and even stated that Israel had a “joint agenda” with those terrorists.
Syria also accused the United States of helping Israel and of being guilty by association.