Two missiles fired towards Israel’s Golan Heights from Syria

Two missiles were fired from Syria towards Israel’s Golan Heights on Saturday night, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit confirmed.

The military said it was checking reports that one of the missiles landed near Israel’s Mount Hermon ski resort while the other landed inside Syrian territory.

There were no incoming rocket sirens activated and no interception of the rockets. The military said that there was no damage or injuries.

The rockets fired on Friday are not believed to be spillover from internal fighting in Syria as was the case in past rocket fire on Israel’s north as there are not any Syrian operations in the area close to the border with Israel’s Golan Heights.

On Monday the Israeli military struck a Syrian military position in the area of Quneitra after an anti-aircraft missile was launched at an Israeli fighter jet flying in Israeli territory.

Syrian troops recaptured southern Syria seven years after losing the area to rebel groups and returned to its positions along with Hezbollah operatives. Both UN Peacekeepers and Russian military police have been deployed along the Golan Heights border.

Israel captured the Golan Heights, some 1,200 square kilometers, from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981. The Syrian capital of Damascus is only 40 kilometers away, a shorter drive than going to Tel Aviv some 221 kilometers away.

In January the Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted an Iranian-made surface-to-surface model with a range of some 200km and payload of hundreds of kilograms of explosives that was fired from the outskirts of Damascus.

According to Syrian reports, an hour earlier Israeli jets had carried out a rare daytime strike on Iranian targets in Syria. No special instructions had been given to the thousands of civilians and no warning siren sounded.

Israeli officials have repeatedly voiced concerns over Iran’s presence in Syria and the smuggling of sophisticated weaponry to Hezbollah from Tehran to Lebanon via Syria, stressing that both are red-lines for the Jewish State.

In April the IDF announced that Hezbollah has been building a new and dangerous terror network in Syria’s Golan Heights without the knowledge of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad under the leadership of Ali Mussa Daqduq who spent five years in an Iraqi prison for a 2007 attack against American troops in the Karbala Governorate.

“The Hezbollah terrorist organization has begun an attempt to establish and entrench a covert force in the Syrian Golan Heights that is designed to act against Israel when given the order,” the IDF said.

The Golan Project has its headquarters in Damascus and the Lebanese capital of Beirut there are tens of operatives operating in the Syrian towns of Hadar, Quinetra and Erneh who collect intelligence on Israel and military movement on the Israeli Golan Heights.

Under the 1974 ceasefire accord signed following the Yom Kippur War the previous year established a buffer zone between the two enemy countries. It was patrolled by UN troops until peacekeepers were abducted by Syrian rebels 2014.

In March US President Donald Trump officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the disputed plateau and last month Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government would name a town in the Golan after Trump in honor of his decision.

While approximately half of the Golan’s residents are Jewish Israelis, a large part are Druze, many of whom are Syrian citizens.

On Friday Netanyahu said that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is in Israel ahead of the presentation of Trump’s “Deal of the Century”, had given him an official State Department map which had been updated to show the Golan Heights as part of Israel.

While Trump’ decision upended decades of US policy and drew international condemnation, the map that Kushner had given Netanyahu had a scribble by Trump which said “Nice” with an arrow pointing towards the Golan.