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Mossad chief says Israel can’t accept Iranian forces in Syria
Mossad chief Yossi Cohen said Israel had “no interest fighting with Syria” but Israel could not “accept Iran’s entrenchment” in the country, “or Syria’s role as a logistical base for transporting weaponry to Lebanon”.
Cohen was speaking at the annual Herzliya Security Conference and he commented on reports that Israeli had bombed Iranian bases in Syria, saying: “Over the last four years, Israel has taken a number of overt and covert measures, of which only a small part has been revealed, to stop and to wreck Iran’s steps to consolidate its hold on Syria and the infrastructure for the manufacture of accurate missiles there. Thanks to this determined activity, I believe that the Iranians will eventually reach the conclusion that it is simply not worth it.”
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that the Israeli Air Force and navy ships attacked targets belonging to the Syrian regime, Iranian militias and Hezbollah. According to Syrian state television 16 people were killed in the strikes, including a baby. SOHR said the strikes were directed at a base housing the 1st Division in the area of al-Kiswah, at Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp sites south of Damascus, at a scientific research centre in the outskirts of Damascus linked to the production of chemical weapons and at a military airfield.
According to ImageSat “a hangar at #SSRC #Jarmaya was bombed” and completely destroyed on the night of 1 July adding that the hangar was “probably used for storage of advanced weapon systems or another sensitive element which required the mentioned accurate strike. According to the media reports, the attacked site is related to Hezbollah and Iran”.
Writing in Haaretz, Amos Harel suggests that the ‘”distribution of the sites attacked could attest to the real goal – hitting what is apparently a logistical chain that supplies advanced weapons to Hezbollah, linking Iran to Lebanon via Syria.” In Yediot Ahronot, Alex Fishman emphasised that such a large-scale attack could not have been carried out without prior and meticulous coordination with Russia.