Israeli forces said Tuesday that they are responding, with artillery and mortars, to an attack with unidentified projectiles from Syria, as Israel’s response against Gaza continues after the Hamas attack.
The Israeli military said unidentified projectiles were fired from Syria and must have landed in a desert area, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
The soldiers “respond with artillery and mortar fire in the direction of the origin of these shots in Syria,” underlines a brief military statement released shortly after the announcement of “a series of shots” coming from the other side of the dividing line.
“It appears they were mortar shots,” a military spokesman told Agence France-Presse (AFP), when asked about the nature of those first shots.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor based in the United Kingdom but with a vast network of informants on the ground, said a Palestinian faction carried out the rocket attack from Syrian territory.
These are the first exchanges of fire between Syria and Israel since the new escalation of violence that began on Saturday.
The so-called Separation of Forces Agreement, reached in 1974 by the two countries, establishes a specific separation between the troops of both sides and stipulates that both Syria and Israel “shall refrain from any military action against the other.”
The Jewish state occupied the Syrian Golan Heights during the Six-Day War in 1967 and then unilaterally annexed the region in 1981.
Cross-border attacks have also occurred on the Lebanon-Israel border since Saturday’s escalation.
After unknown attackers launched several rockets from southern Lebanon today, the Israeli army responded by attacking two observation posts belonging to Hezbollah, the forces of the Jewish state confirmed in a statement.
When Hezbollah launched missiles at the tank in Avivim, which it says it destroyed, Israel responded again with aerial bombardments against another observation post of the Lebanese group, the Israeli army explained, ruling out casualties among its forces.
For its part, the Lebanese Army reported that during the afternoon there were also several Israeli artillery attacks against points in the southern district of Tyre, while the Lebanese National News Agency (ANN) reported the fall of phosphorus bombs in Al Mari and Majidiya.
The Palestinian Islamic group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israeli territory this Saturday, called Operation “Al-Aqsa Storm”, with the launch of thousands of rockets and the incursion of armed militiamen by land, sea and air.
In response to the surprise attack, Israel bombed several Hamas facilities in the Gaza Strip from the air, in an operation it called “Iron Swords.”
During the incursion into Israeli territory, Hamas took more than a hundred civilian and military hostages, which they took to the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s military response, which declared war on Hamas following the attack, led to the deaths of more than 800 people in Gaza, according to the most recent reports.
On the Israeli side, a senior military officer said the death toll exceeded 1,000.
Source: TSF
