Israel Strikes Back At Syrian Army Positions From Golan Heights

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) today fired a Spike missile targeting at least one Syrian army position in the Golan Heights. This was in response to a rocket fired from Syria which struck inside Israeli territory.

The air-raid sirens sounded loudly Thursday afternoon in the northern section of the Golan Heights, inside the Golan Regional Council, north of the community of Ortal. Israeli soldiers are currently searching the area for additional rockets.

Reuters reported earlier that the IDF weren’t clear about precisely which target they hit, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it was an air strike on a Syrian army base on the Golan.

There were no immediate reports of casualties from either side.

The Israeli army released a statement about the incident: “The IDF sees the Syrian army as responsible for any rocket fire towards Israel,” they wrote.

The civil war in Syria, which has been raging for nearly four years now and has seen the death of more than 180,000 people, has oftentimes spilled over into the Jewish State, which shares a border in the north with Lebanon and Syria.

Syrian opposition sources said today that the fighting is focused in the southern outskirts of Quneitra but is creeping closer to the Israeli border. On Monday, a heavy fire exchange was reported in the Quneitra area between forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and rebels fighting to overthrow him.

Last week, ISIS fighters in the region overran a UN crossing point on the”disengagement line” that has separated Israelis from Syrians on the Golan Heights since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Forty-five Fijians, representing the UN in the region, were captured Thursday, and 72 Filipinos were besieged by militants at two other locations for two days before the peacekeepers escaped.

According to the Al-Watan newspaper in Syria, Assad’s forces are preparing to take back the Quneitra border crossing from the Nusra Front rebels. The militants are still holding the 45 Fijian members of the United Nations’ UNDOF Golan Heights force.

It remains to be seen how badly the fighting in Syrian will affect Israel’s northern border as the Jewish state recovers from its recent war with Hamas in Gaza.