Israel attacks Syrian military targets

Israel said its air force bombed Syrian government targets early on Wednesday in response to an earlier attack on its soldiers, marking the country’s biggest publicly acknowledged military strike against its neighbour since the civil war against Bashar al-Assad’s regime began three years ago.

The Israeli military said that it had targeted a Syrian army training facility, military headquarters, and artillery batteries in response to an attack on its troops in the northern Golan Heights. Four Israeli soldiers were injured, one of them severely, in that incident, which happened on Tuesday when an explosive device was detonated while they were on patrol in the northern Golan Heights.

The Israel Defence Forces acknowledged the air strike shortly after 3am on Wednesday, and said that it had taken place “a short while ago”. A spokesman for the IDF, Peter Lerner, said in a statement that the attack on Israel’s troops was “an unacceptable escalation of violence from Syria”.

Israel is officially neutral in the war against Mr Assad, but has carried out several military strikes on targets in southern Syria or Lebanon since early 2013 to prevent the transfer of weapons it sees as strategically important to its regional enemies, led by the militant group Hizbollah.

Word of those strikes has come from foreign sources or people on the ground, with Israel maintaining official silence on its responsibility, or at most hinting at it. In a few other cases, the IDF has openly claimed responsibility for firing back over the border in minor clashes.

The Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981, has seen other clashes similar to Tuesday’s bomb attack on Israeli soldiers, with Israel blaming Hizbollah troops fighting alongside Mr Assad’s forces for trying to pull it into the Syrian civil war.

Last Friday Israel fired at Hizbollah targets in southern Lebanon after an improvised explosive device was detonated in the Syrian-Israeli border area. In another such incident on March 5 the IDF shot two Hizbollah fighters it said were attempting to plant a bomb near the border.

A senior Israeli military official told foreign journalists at a briefing earlier in March that Hizbollah and jihadist groups fighting in southern Syria were increasingly targeting Israel as a “non-Islamic entity” in the region and seeking to provoke clashes between Israel and the Assad regime.