Iran threatens ‘harsh response’ after alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria

Iranian militias warned of a “harsh response” after a number of Syrian and Iranian-backed forces were killed and wounded in an alleged Israeli airstrike near Palmyra in central Syria on Wednesday night, the second such airstrike in the past week.

The Syrian state news agency SANA reported that an Israeli airstrike targeted a communications tower and a number of nearby sites, killing one Syrian soldier and wounding three others. The strike was carried out from the direction of the al-Tanf area near the Jordanian and Iraqi borders with Syria, a Syrian military source told SANA.

On Thursday morning, a joint operations room affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Hezbollah and the Assad regime warned that it had decided to respond harshly to the airstrikes after a number of operatives were killed and wounded in the strikes, according to Hezbollah-affiliated media. It is unclear if the statement was referring to casualties other than those reported by SANA.

The joint operations room stressed that its mission in Syria is only to help the Syrian state to confront “terrorists” and ISIS.

“For years, we have been subjected to attacks from the Israeli and American enemy in an attempt to drag us into side battles that were not a priority for our presence in Syria, and the Zionists’ excuse was that they were targeting accurate weapons and sensitive equipment that posed a threat to their usurping entity,” added the joint statement.

Around the time of the airstrike, the airspace above the Golan Heights was closed to flights until Friday at 12:15 a.m.

The airstrike comes just a week after an alleged Israeli airstrike on the T-4 airport, also near Palmyra, wounded six Syrian soldiers, according to SANA.

It is an interesting one… pic.twitter.com/PhtVXFdJGn

Satellite imagery from Sentinel Hub shared on social media showed damage on the runway at T-4 after the airstrike last week.

Before the airstrike last week, the last airstrike blamed on Israel in Syria took place in August, targeting the Qalamoun Mountains near the capital of Damascus. Four Syrian civilians were reportedly killed when Syrian air defense missiles fell in a residential area in the town of Qara.