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Northern Israel remains tense following Syrian attack
The situation on Israel’s northern border with Syria remained tense yesterday following a Syrian attack on Sunday which killed an Israeli teenager, prompting Israel’s Air Force to hit military targets in Syria.
Anti-tank fire from an area under the control of troops loyal to Syrian President Assad struck a civilian car on Sunday, killing teenager Mohammed Karkara, from Arraba, an Arab village in the lower Galilee region. He had been accompanying his father, a civilian contractor who was delivering water to workers strengthening the border fence between Israel and Syria. In response, Israeli tanks struck at the source of fire and then Israel’s Air Force hit a number of military targets. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says that 10 Syrian soldiers were killed in the operation. Syria has complained to the United Nations about the Israeli air strike, calling it a “flagrant” violation of armistice agreements.
Maariv reports that following the incident, there was heightened activity on the Israel-Syrian border yesterday. Apparently, Israeli planes and unmanned aerial vehicles were active in the air, while troops from the Golani Brigade and the Engineering Corps intensively patrolled the border area. The same report said that despite the tension, Israel continued to treat Syrians wounded in the conflict there, with three injured Syrian teenagers yesterday taken for treatment to a hospital in Tiberias.
Meanwhile, in Lebanon’s capital Beirut yesterday, a suicide car bomb exploded in a Shi’ite area in the south of the city, wounding 19 people. Previous attacks in Lebanon in Shi’ite areas have been carried out by Sunni armed groups, in protest at the support given to Syria’s President Assad by Shi’ite organisation Hezbollah.
Elsewhere in the region, the Sunni Jihadist group ISIS is advancing towards another of Israel’s neighbours, Jordan. With ISIS having taken control of a checkpoint on the Jordan-Iraq border, the Times says that Jordanian forces have been bolstered in the border region to ward of any potential threat.