Israel Launches New Attacks on West Syrian City of Qusayr

Israeli airstrikes against targets in Syria are becoming an almost daily occurrence, with another round of strikes reported today in the city of Qusayr, along the border with neighboring Lebanon. The outskirts of Qusayr came under attack on Friday, killing 10 people, mostly civilians.

Today’s attacks targeted an industrial zone, along with some residential buildings. The health director of Homs Province said that there were no casualties in the latest attacks. Exactly what was hit isn’t entirely clear, but locals reported that a lot of infrastructure was damaged.

Israel offered comments on today’s attack, calling it an “intelligence-based” strike against the Hezbollah weapons storage facilities in Qusayr. They further claimed this proved Hezbollah was smuggling weapons from Qusayr into Lebanon through the nearby border crossing.

Despite the claims, it isn’t clear that what was hit was actually a weapons depot. There certainly was no report of a secondary explosion from any of the strikes, which generally is the sign the airstrikes ignited some weapons being stored within.

This was the second series of Israeli airstrikes against Syria in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, they carried out attacks against the area of Sayeda Zeinab, a suburb of the capital city of Damascus. Two people were killed in that attack, and five others wounded.

Though Israel has been attacking Syria once in awhile for many years now, the rate of attacks has increased quite a bit in recent weeks, coinciding with the Israeli invasion of neighboring Lebanon. Israeli officials have often referred to Syria as one of the “seven fronts” they are engaged in military operations in at once.