Syria has suspended all flights at Damascus International Airport after a pro-government newspaper reported it was an Israeli airstrike near the facility. The Al-Watan newspaper reported that Friday’s attack caused damage to the runway at the airport, without giving further details. The Syrian state news agency SANA did not report any casualties, but said flights had been suspended because “some technical equipment stopped working 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. The Syrian government’s air defenses intercepted most of the missiles, while some reached their target, SANA reported. “At 4:20 a.m. [01:20 GMT] “The Israeli enemy carried out an air strike by firing rockets from the occupied Golan Heights,” the report said. According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the Israeli raids hit weapons depots belonging to the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement, as well as other Iranian-backed groups near Damascus airport. The watchdog, which relies on a wide network of sources across Syria, said at least three such positions had been hit, injuring several people. Since the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Israel is believed to have carried out hundreds of airstrikes, although it has rarely claimed responsibility. The attacks are an attempt to prevent Iranian-backed forces in Syria, as well as Hezbollah fighters, from gaining more power in Syria and possibly attacking Israel. 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 the SOHR killed 10 fighters , including six Syrian soldiers, in the deadliest raid in 2022. The conflict in Syria has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s population.
