Weapons storehouse at Damascus airport was struck by Israel last week.
By ANNA AHRONHEIMUpdated: JANUARY 16, 2019 05:01Iranian missile warehouse destroyed, Damascus International Airport(photo credit: IMAGESAT INTERNATIONAL (ISI))
New satellite images of an Iranian weapons storehouse at the Damascus International Airport showed the complete destruction of the site following Israeli airstrikes on Friday.Released by the Israeli satellite company ImageSat International, one image taken before the strikes showed a structure that measured 20 by 50 meters and was later missing, leaving three craters where the compound once stood.According to ImageSat, the structure was likely used as a missile storehouse, including the Fajr-5, which can be launched from a mobile platform and has a reported range of 75 kilometers.On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed reports that the airstrike was carried out by the Israel Air Force on Friday, saying that Israel has carried out hundreds of attacks against Iranian and Hezbollah targets.“The accumulation of recent attacks proves that we are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria,” Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting.On Monday, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi denied that Tehran had any military bases or military presence in Syria, denying claims made by Netanyahu and former IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Gadi Eisenkot that Israel has struck hundreds of Iranian targets in Syria over the past two years.“The Zionist War Ministry’s comments are baseless, false, misleading and is an attempt to justify their ongoing failures in the region,” Qasemi was quoted as saying by Iran’s official news agency, IRNA. He added that “the Zionists always spread lies and embark on psychological warfare to achieve their evil goals in the region. Iranian officials are in Syria strictly for consultation purposes. The Syrian government invited us in order to advise them on methods with which to fight terrorism.”On Tuesday morning, at the ceremony marking the appointment of incoming IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, Netanyahu warned Tehran to leave Syria.“I’m telling you, get out of there fast. We won’t stop attacking,” he said.Syria’s SANA state news agency said that Israeli warplanes fired a number of missiles toward the Damascus area on Friday, triggering Syrian air defenses that shot most of them down.
“At 11:15 before midnight, Israeli warplanes coming from the Galilee area launched several missiles towards the surroundings of Damascus and our air defenses immediately intercepted them and downed most of them,” a military source was quoted by SANA as saying, adding that there were no casualties in the strikes, rather only “material damage to one of the ammunition warehouses.”In late December, an Israeli strike against another Iranian weapons storehouse outside Damascus was completely destroyed. The storehouse also supposedly held Fajr-5 missiles in the Syrian regime’s 4th Division camp in the Al-Muna area.
