Explosion Rocks Damascus Airport Israel neither confirms nor denies its involvement but a government minister says the blast is ‘consistent’ with Israel policy By Rory Jones in Tel Aviv and Noam Raydan in Beirut
https://www.wsj.com/articles/explosion-rocks-damascus-airport-1493286538
A large explosion rocked the area near Damascus International Airport early Thursday, in what official Syrian state media said was an Israeli missile strike.
Israel neither confirmed nor denied it was behind the attack, in keeping with official government policy. But Israel’s transport and intelligence minister Yisrael Katz told Israel’s Army Radio on Thursday that the incident was “entirely consistent with our policy of preventing smuggling of weapons to Hezbollah.”
Citing an unnamed military source, Syria’s state news agency, SANA, said the target of the Israeli attack was a military position southwest of the airport and that the blast caused “some material damage.”
The U.K.-based opposition monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the explosion was heard across the capital Damascus and its suburbs. It said the target of the blasts could have been warehouses close to the airport that belong to Hezbollah.
Israel has repeatedly said that it will act to interdict Iranian-supplied weapons transfers in Syria bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syrian state TV said Thursday that there are military bases surrounding the airport used for fighting “terrorists”—a term the regime uses to refer to much of the Syrian opposition.
Iran and Hezbollah have played a major role in maintaining the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power, as it fights an array of antigovernment and militant groups, including Islamic State.
The comments by Mr. Katz, the Israeli minister, came after Syrian and Lebanese media accused Israeli warplanes of carrying out an airstrike on the airport.
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