The sound of three violent explosions was heard in the vicinity of the capital Damascus Friday nights, the result of Israeli missile attacks, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. The explosions were heard in the Al-Kiswah area, south-west of Damascus, where warehouses of the Iranian and Hezbollah as well as bases of the air defenses are located.
The Syrisan news agency SANA reported downing the attack missiles, but the Observatory said it was not clear whether the explosions had been caused by interception by Syrian air defenses, or by the missiles reaching their targets.
According to SANA, the Syrian Army’s aerial defenses on Friday night intercepted hostile targets coming from the direction of Quneitra. A military source told SANA that aerial defenses detected hostile targets coming from the direction of Quneitra and intercepted them. Earlier, SANA’s reporter said that aerial defenses targeted luminous objects coming from the “occupied territories,” shooting down a number of them.
Israel, as usual, did not report an attack. If the official Syrian sources, as well as the generally trusted opposition, can be trusted, it means that the IDF has attacked in Syria, which is a clear sign that Jerusalem believes that such a move would not, at this time, invite an Iranian response by the Revolutionary Guards in Syria or their proxies, the Shiite militias stationed in Syria, or Hezbollah.
The last thing Iran is seeking at this point is an escalation of the US military threat in the region, with three major US Navy contingencies parked along its shores in the Persian Gulf.