Syria Suspends Damascus Airport Flights After Israeli Attack

Al-Watan newspaper said that Friday’s attack left the runway at the airport damaged.

Syrian state news agency SANA did not mention a strike, but said that flights had been suspended because “some technical equipment stopped functioning at the airport”.

The announcement came after state media reported that an Israeli missile had hit several targets in the Syrian capital Damascus, injuring at least one civilian, earlier on Friday.

Syrian government air defenses intercepted most of the missiles, while some reached their target, SANA said.

“At 4:20 a.m. [01:20 GMT] … the Israeli enemy carried out an aerial aggression by firing a volley of missiles from the occupied Golan Heights,” the report said.

The latest attack follows one on May 21, which killed three people near the Syrian capital, another on May 13 that killed five people in central Syria, and another near Damascus on April 27, which according to SOHR killed 10 Syrians, among them six soldiers, in the deadliest raid in 2022.

Syria has been in the grip of foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies aid Takfiri terrorist groups that continue to wreak havoc in the country.

Israel frequently targets military positions inside Syria, especially those of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah which has played a key role in helping the Syrian army in its fight against foreign-backed terrorists.

The Tel Aviv regime rarely comments on its cowardly attacks on Syrian territories, which many see as a knee-jerk reaction to the Syrian government’s phenomenal success in confronting and decimating terrorism.

Israel has been the principal supporter of terrorist groups that oppose the democratically-elected government of President Bashar al-Assad since the foreign-backed militancy erupted in Syria.