WarSclerotic

Targets included “observation positions and intelligence-gathering tools inside Syrian posts,” the military said.

Syrian state news agency SANA said the strikes injured two soldiers, hit three sites and caused fires.

Arabic media reports said missiles had hit anti-aircraft batteries near Quneitra in the Syrian Golan Heights.

The incident in the morning saw explosions heard along the border and shrapnel striking a home and a car on the Israeli side in the Druze town of Majdal Shams, causing light damage. The cause was reported to be either anti-aircraft fire toward an IDF observation balloon or an artillery shell fired from Syria toward Israel, possibly by accident.

Reported incident of an IDF airstrikes occurred near Majdal Farms. @manniefabian #Israel #Syria pic.twitter.com/9aOEOmQe9l

— Joe Truzman (@Jtruzmah) July 24, 2020

“The IDF holds the Syrian regime responsible for the fire against Israel earlier today,” the army said in a statement. “The IDF will continue operating with determination and will respond to any violation of Israeli sovereignty.”

The incidents came amid heightened tensions between Israel and the Hezbollah terror group, which maintains a presence in the Syrian Golan Heights, after one of the organization’s fighters was killed in an airstrike attributed to Israel on Monday night.

The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, made an unannounced visit to Israel on Friday, meeting with Defense Minister Benny Gantz, IDF chief Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi and Mossad director Yossi Cohen, along with other top brass. Israeli television commentators speculated on the possible significance of the visit, particularly regarding the threat posed by Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah.

The IDF further stepped up its defenses along the country’s northern borders on Friday, the army said, out of concern the Hezbollah terror group may carry out an attack against military targets along the frontier in retaliation and warned Beirut it would bear responsibility for any possible Hezbollah strike.

“In light of a situational assessment in the IDF and in accordance with the Northern Command’s defense plan, the IDF’s deployment will change in both the military and civilian arena with the goal of strengthening defenses along the northern border,” the IDF said in a statement.

In the past, Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate to losses of its soldiers in Syria with attacks on Israel. This was the case in September, when the terror group fired three anti-tank guided missiles at Israeli military targets along the Lebanese border, narrowly missing an IDF armored ambulance with five soldiers inside, after the IDF killed two of its fighters in Syria the month before.

In a tacit threat, the IDF preemptively warned Beirut that it sees the state of Lebanon as “responsible for all actions emanating from Lebanon.”

Beginning at 8 p.m. on Friday night, roadblocks were installed along a number of highways to prevent military vehicles vulnerable to attack from anti-tank guided missiles fired from either Lebanon or Syria, from driving on certain roads.

Entrances to some communities where the military maintains a presence that are exposed to attack were also blocked for IDF vehicles. As the military assessed that Hezbollah planned to attack only IDF targets, civilian vehicles will be able to travel freely throughout the area.

However, the IDF said that some farmers who have fields directly along the border may be blocked from working their lands.

The military also cleared some troops out of positions directly along the border, moving them deeper into Israel, so that they would not represent a clear target for Hezbollah, while still allowing them to defend the frontier.

The IDF has also stepped up its intelligence collection efforts along the border in recent days. Throughout the day on Friday, Lebanese media reported on large numbers of Israeli drones flying overhead.

Judah Ari Gross contributed to this report.

The Israel Defense Forces on Thursday announced it was sending reinforcements to the northern border amid the threat of retaliation by the Lebanese Hezbollah terror group over the death of one of its fighters in Syria earlier this week.

“In light of a situational assessment that was held in the IDF, it was decided to send a pinpoint reinforcement of infantry troops to the Northern Command,” the military said.

Also on Thursday, sources close to Hezbollah told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper that the terror group would likely respond to the death of its fighter on Monday night.

An IDF spokesperson said the reinforcement consisted of one battalion — the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion — and a small number of additional troops, who were being sent to the Northern Command’s Galilee Division.

Ali Kamel Mohsen Jawad, a member of the Hezbollah terror group, whom the organization says was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 20, 2020. (Hezbollah media)

The move came two days after Hezbollah accused Israel of killing one of its members — Ali Kamel Mohsen Jawad — in an airstrike south of Damascus on Monday night, raising the possibility of retaliation against the Jewish state.

In response to the terror group’s announcement about Jawad’s death, both the IDF and Hezbollah went on high alert along the frontier, according to media reports from both sides of the border.

In the past, Hezbollah has retaliated for confirmed deaths of its members at Israel’s hands with attacks on the Jewish state, generally along the Israeli-Lebanese border. As a result of this policy, the IDF generally refrains from killing Hezbollah troops in Syria.

Such an exchange occurred last August, when the IDF killed two Hezbollah members that the military said were taking part in an Iranian-run operation in southern Syria that attempted to attack IDF border positions with armed drones.

“If Israel kills any of our members in Syria, we’ll respond from Lebanon and not in the Shebaa Farms, and we tell the Israeli army on the border to be very cautious and to wait for us,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech at the time.

A location near the northern Israeli town of Avivim shows the site where an anti-tank missile fired by Hezbollah fighters hit a road on September 1, 2019, seen on September 10, 2019. (Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel)

Days later, in response to their deaths — as well as an alleged Israeli drone attack in Beirut that occurred the same night — Hezbollah fired three anti-tank guided missiles at Israeli military targets along the Lebanese border, narrowly missing an IDF armored ambulance in with five soldiers inside.

On Thursday, sources “familiar with [Hezbollah’s] views” told Asharq Al-Awsat that the terror group was abiding by that same “equation that Nasrallah set last year” of retaliating when one of its fighters is killed in Syria.

The airstrike attributed to Israel on Monday night hit weapons depots and military positions belonging to Syrian regime forces and Iran-backed militia fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The group said the aerial bombardments caused several explosions around the town of Kiswah, an area that has long been associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The attack reportedly came in two waves. The Reuters news service reported that the assault hit targets in the towns of Jabal al Mane, Muqaylabiya and Zakiya, causing “huge blasts” and allegedly killing Iranian personnel.

Syrian Air defenses respond to alleged Israeli missiles targeting south of the capital Damascus, on July 20, 2020 (AFP)

Reuters quoted a Syrian analyst with sources on the ground named Zaid al Reys as saying that the target of the attack was a “major ammunition depot.”

Israel has launched hundreds of strikes in Syria since the start of the civil war in 2011. It has targeted government troops, allied Iranian forces and fighters from the Lebanese Shiite terror group Hezbollah.

It rarely confirms details of its operations in Syria, but says Iran’s presence in support of President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah is a threat and that it will continue its strikes.

Monday’s attack came a week and a half after Iran and Syria signed an agreement that would see Tehran upgrade the Syrian military’s air defenses, apparently in response to ongoing Israeli strikes in the country.

It was the first strike in Syria to be attributed to Israel since June, when the Observatory said nine fighters were killed in airstrikes targeting positions of Iran-backed militias near the Iraqi border. Those strikes came hours after a similar raid killed six other Tehran-backed fighters.

Times of Israel staff and AFP contributed to this report.

The Hezbollah terror group on Tuesday evening accused Israel of killing one of its members in an airstrike outside Damascus the night before, raising the possibility of retaliation against the Jewish state.

In a statement carried by Hezbollah-controlled media channels, the terror group said its operative Ali Kamel Mohsen Jawad was killed in an act of “Zionist aggression,” apparently referring to a series of airstrikes south of Damascus late Monday night that were attributed to Israel.

In the past, Hezbollah has retaliated for confirmed deaths of its members at Israel’s hands with attacks on the Jewish state, generally along the Israeli-Lebanese border.

Such an exchange occurred last August, when the Israel Defense Forces killed two Hezbollah members that the military said were taking part in an Iranian-run operation in southern Syria that attempted to attack IDF border positions with armed drones.

“If Israel kills any of our members in Syria, we’ll respond from Lebanon and not in the Shebaa Farms, and we tell the Israeli army on the border to be very cautious and to wait for us,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech at the time.

Syrian Air defenses respond to alleged Israeli missiles south of the capital Damascus, on July 20, 2020 (AFP)

Days later, in response to their deaths — as well as an alleged Israeli drone attack in Beirut that occurred the same night — Hezbollah fired three anti-tank guided missiles at Israeli military targets along the Lebanese border, narrowly missing an IDF armored ambulance in with five soldiers inside.

A Britain-based Syrian war monitoring group reported that five Iran-backed fighters were killed in an Israeli missile strike south of the Syrian capital on Monday night. It was not immediately clear if Jawad was counted among the five.

The missile attack on Monday night hit weapons depots and military positions belonging to Syrian regime forces and Iran-backed militia fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The attack wounded at least seven Syrian troops, according to the official SANA news agency, which said the missiles were launched by warplanes from the Golan Heights.

The five killed were all non-Syrian paramilitary fighters, according to the Observatory.

It added that 11 combatants were wounded in total — four non-Syrian fighters and seven Syrian troops, of whom two were in critical condition.

The group said the aerial bombardments caused several explosions around the town of Kiswah, an area that has long been associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The attack reportedly came in two waves. The Reuters news service reported that the assault hit targets in the towns of Jabal al Mane, Muqaylabiya and Zakiya, causing “huge blasts” and allegedly killing Iranian personnel.

A military source quoted by SANA claimed that most of the missiles were shot down. Such claims of interceptions by Syrian state media are generally dismissed by defense analysts as empty boasts.

Reuters quoted a Syrian analyst with sources on the ground named Zaid al Reys as saying that the target of the attack was a “major ammunition depot.”

Syrian Air defenses respond to alleged Israeli missiles targeting south of the capital Damascus, on July 20, 2020 (AFP)

Israel has launched hundreds of strikes in Syria since the start of the civil war in 2011. It has targeted government troops, allied Iranian forces and fighters from the Lebanese Shiite terror group Hezbollah.

It rarely confirms details of its operations in Syria, but says Iran’s presence in support of President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah is a threat and that it will continue its strikes.

Monday’s attack came a week and a half after Iran and Syria signed an agreement that would see Tehran upgrade the Syrian military’s air defenses, apparently in response to ongoing Israeli strikes in the country.

It was the first strike in Syria to be attributed to Israel since June, when the Observatory said nine fighters were killed in airstrikes targeting positions of Iran-backed militias near the Iraqi border. Those strikes came hours after a similar raid killed six other Tehran-backed fighters.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

Negotiations between Iran and China over the creation of a 25-year strategic accord appear to have concluded, with The New York Times on Sunday publishing excerpts from an 18-page agreement labeled “final version” that could see Beijing invest $400 billion over the next 25 years in exchange for discount oil.

The document — which The Times said was dated June 2020 and has yet to be approved by the Majles, Iran’s parliament — detailed how Beijing would receive Iranian oil at a sharply reduced price for the next quarter century in exchange expanding its economic involvement in a variety of fields, including banking and infrastructure, such as telecommunications and transport.

This would potentially include giving the Iranians access to China’s global positioning system and helping roll out an Iranian 5G network.

China is Iran’s top trading partner.

In this photo from January 23, 2016, released by an official website of the office of the Iranian supreme leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, right, meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Tehran, Iran. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)

Tehran has been hit hard by American sanctions reimposed following Washington’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal in May 2018. Iranian crude exports have been severely curtailed by the US sanctions, as has much of the country’s foreign trade.

The deal could bring Iran as much as $400 billion in Chinese investment over the next quarter century, according to sources with knowledge of the deal who spoke with The Times.

The deal would also encompass military cooperation, including weapons development, combined training and intelligence sharing in order to combat ““the lopsided battle with terrorism, drug and human trafficking and cross-border crimes,” The Times reported.

Both Tehran and Beijing are currently at loggerheads with Washington, Iran over its nuclear program and China over ongoing trade disputes with the Trump administration.

The US has accused China of stealing its intellectual property and engaging in forced technology transfers from US firms doing business there.

The accord said that Iran and China as “two ancient Asian cultures, two partners in the sectors of trade, economy, politics, culture and security with a similar outlook and many mutual bilateral and multilateral interests will consider one another strategic partners,” the paper reported.

Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers wearing face masks to protect against the spread of the new coronavirus march near the Forbidden City during a plenary session of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, May 25, 2020. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

On Sunday, a senior aide to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that the accord could be signed as early as next March, Radio Farda reported.

There has been some pushback in Iran regarding the deal.

Last Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told lawmakers that their country had been negotiating with the Chinese and that the terms would be announced once a deal is struck.

During the session, Zarif was heckled by lawmakers, largely over his key role in negotiating a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which the US unilaterally abandoned in 2018 as a prelude to reimposing biting sanctions.

It was his first address to parliament since a new house started work in late May in the wake of elections that were dominated by conservatives and ultra-conservatives.

Zarif insisted there was “nothing secret” about the prospective China deal.

The nation would be informed “when an accord has been concluded,” he said, adding that the intention had already been made public in January 2016 when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Tehran.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has come out publicly in support of a strategic bilateral partnership with China.

The planned China deal has been a hot topic on Iranian social media since populist ex-president Mahmud Ahmadinejad last month condemned negotiations underway with a foreign country.

An alleged Israeli attack on an advanced centrifuge development and assembly plant at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility exhibited the complexity of the Stuxnet virus that sabotaged Iranian enrichment centrifuges a decade ago, experts and analysts said in a new report Friday.

Officials with knowledge of the blast at Natanz last week told The New York Times that it was most likely the result of a bomb planted at the facility, potentially at a strategic gas line, but that it was not out of the question that a cyberattack was used to cause a malfunction that led to the explosion.

The Stuxnet virus was uncovered in 2010 and was widely reported to have been developed together by US and Israeli intelligence agencies. It penetrated Iran’s rogue nuclear program, taking control and sabotaging parts of its enrichment processes by speeding up its centrifuges. Up to 1,000 centrifuges out of 5,000 were eventually damaged by the virus, according to reports, setting back the nuclear program.

The July 2 Natanz explosion was one of a series of mysterious blasts at Iranian strategic sites in recent weeks — the latest of which occurred Friday morning — which have once again been largely attributed to either Washington, Jerusalem, or both.

Friday’s blast “appeared to come from the direction of a missile base,” The Times noted. “If it proves to have been another attack, it will further shake the Iranians by demonstrating, yet again, that even their best-guarded nuclear and missile facilities have been infiltrated.”

Intelligence officials who assessed the damage to the Netanz centrifuge facility told The Times they believed it may have set the Iranians back by as much as two years.

Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at Washington-based think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the newspaper that the latest attacks had led to “extreme internal and external pressure” on Iran as it grapples with an economic crisis and punishing US sanctions.

A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry said Friday that the cause of the Natanz explosion was not yet known, but warned that the country would retaliate severely if it emerges that a foreign entity was involved, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

However, he also sought to downplay Israeli involvement, claiming that such reports were only intended to aggrandize Israel and asserting that Jerusalem claims responsibility for incidents “in every corner of the world.”

He added: “The international community must respond and set limits to these dangerous actions by the Zionist regime.”

His comments came as Iran appeared to publicly acknowledge on Tuesday that last week’s fire at Natanz was not an accident.

The latest mysterious blast in Iran came early Friday, as Iranian media reported an explosion in western Tehran, prompting electricity to be cut in surrounding suburbs.

Iran’s official IRIB news agency reported the blast, citing online reports by residents. A member of the Iranian parliament, Hossein Haghverdi, denied that any explosion occurred, saying the power outage was due to a problem at a nearby power station, according to The New York Times.

An analyst told The New York Times there were underground military installations in the area.

On Tuesday, an explosion reportedly damaged a factory south of Tehran. According to Iranian media reports, two people were killed and three were injured in the blast at the Sepahan Bresh factory in the Kahrizak district.

The area’s governor said human error was to blame for the incident.

An explosion also reportedly damaged a power plant in the Iranian city of Ahvaz last Saturday. A few hours later, the Islamic Republic News Agency said a chlorine gas leak at a petrochemical center in southeast Iran sickened 70 workers.

A week before the Natanz blast, an explosion was felt in Tehran, apparently caused by an explosion at the Parchin military complex, which defense analysts believe holds an underground tunnel system and missile production facilities.

Israel has also been reported to have been behind a cyberattack in May on an Iranian port facility, causing widespread chaos, apparently in retaliation for an attempt by Tehran to target Israel’s water infrastructure.

Channel 13 news reported that the April assault on Israeli water command and control systems had greatly angered Israeli leaders, who saw it as a significant escalation by Iran and a crossing of a red line because it targeted civil infrastructure.