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KISWEH, Syria: In the Syrian region of Kisweh, southwest of Damascus, residents jolted awake by Israeli strikes voiced their fears Wednesday of a fresh escalation after similar attacks had appeared to taper off in recent weeks.
Israel said it had targeted military sites containing weapons in the Tuesday night raids, which came just days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded the demilitarization of Syria’s south.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least two people were killed at the headquarters of a military unit in Kisweh, while other raids struck military sites in Daraa province to the south.
“We heard successive strikes followed by explosions. The sky lit up, then we saw tongues of flame rising,” said Ahmed Mohammed, who works at a service station near the military site in Kisweh.
“We fear the resumption of Israeli strikes and an Israeli incursion.”
Members of the new Syrian government’s armed forces occupied the site, located in a large field.
Aerial photos taken by AFP showed 20 tanks at the site, three of them blackened by flames.
The owner of a nearby car dealership, who gave his name as Rayan, said most of the tanks had been moved there after they were abandoned by the former Syrian armed forces around the time of the fall of president Bashar Assad.
“When the missiles fell, the houses and windows shook,” he said, adding that a drone had been filming in the area about an hour beforehand.
After the strikes, the Israeli military said that military assets in southern Syria “pose a threat to the citizens of Israel,” adding it would “continue to operate in order to remove” such threats.
The nighttime raids came hours after demonstrations in several Syrian cities in response to Netanyahu’s call on Sunday for the “complete demilitarization” of the country’s south.
Following the toppling of Assad in December, Israel carried out a wave of hundreds of strikes against positions formerly held by his military, while also sending troops into a UN-patrolled buffer zone that has separated Israeli and Syrian forces on the strategic Golan Heights since 1974.
“While the strikes were previously focused on border crossings and abandoned weapons warehouses, they are now directly targeting vital military sites and strategic hills,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
Netanyahu, he added, was starting “to put his threats into action.”
Syria’s new authorities have condemned Israel’s strikes in their territory, but the country’s interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa has also said it is too exhausted by years of civil war to undertake any new conflicts.
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