[Dargo]

The Israeli army ‘destroyed’ the Syrian military fleet on Monday night with rockets fired from ships. So says Defence Minister Israel Katz on a visit to a military maritime base in the city of Haifa. The aim of the operation was to ‘pre-emptively eliminate strategic threats against Israel’, Katz said. AFP photographers were able to capture the damage in the port city of Latakia this morning. Israel has also carried out more than 300 airstrikes up there on Syria since rebels took Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad fell, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) reported earlier today.

The organisation, which relies on an extensive network of sources across Syria, said it had recorded ‘almost 310 attacks’ by ‘the Israeli air force’ since the announcement of Assad's fall Sunday morning, with AFP journalists in Damascus reporting explosions this morning. Israel sees the upheaval in Syria as an opportunity to weaken that country militarily. Katz confirmed the attacks, though without giving the exact number. ‘The Israeli army has conducted operations in Syria in recent days to attack and destroy strategic capabilities that threaten the state of Israel,’ he said. The minister also warned Syria's new leaders not to ‘follow the Assad path’.

According to the OSDH, the attacks were aimed at ‘destroying the weapons still present in the warehouses and military units controlled by the forces of the former regime’, which were affiliated with Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah, the organisation said in a statement. According to the Observatory, major Syrian military bases, warehouses, airfields, anti-aircraft installations and radars have been destroyed. In Damascus, a scientific research centre was bombed. According to eyewitnesses, almost nothing is left of the centre.

Katz said this afternoon that he has effectively ordered the army to create a ‘sterile defensive zone’ in southern Syria to ‘prevent any terrorist threat’, without requiring a permanent Israeli presence on Syrian territory. At issue is the buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Israel strenuously denies that it wants to advance towards Damascus in the process. The Syrian capital is less than 45 kilometres from the truce line between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights. That line was the front line at the end of the 1973 war, after which the narrow buffer zone was established.

The Israeli army denies that it is advancing towards the Syrian capital Damascus. Earlier today, international news agencies, based on anonymous Syrian sources, wrote that groups of Israeli forces had approached the capital. But according to army spokesmen, the units barely got past the buffer zone, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Spokesman Nadav Shoshani said the forces had taken a ‘limited number’ of points around the buffer zone. Israel says the capture of the buffer zone this weekend, which covers some 400 square kilometres, is temporary. Shoshani argues that the military presence in the region is necessary to ensure Israel's security now that rebels control Syria. The Israeli presence should prevent abandoned weaponry from reaching them, Shoshani argued.

Earlier on Tuesday, Israel faced criticism from Turkey, which has had a big finger in the country for years. Turkish-backed militant groups, united in the Syrian National Army (SNA), have long been operating across the border in northern Syria, fighting Kurdish forces in particular. Moreover, Turkey itself has occupied parts of northern Syria for years. Nevertheless, Turkey criticises Israel's action: ‘Israel once again shows that it is an occupying power,’ the Turkish foreign ministry wrote in a statement.

Turkey “strongly condemns” Israel advancing into Syrian territory, says Israel is displaying its “occupying mentality.” Hypocritical, as Turkey itself occupies large swaths of Syrian territory and is currently attacking the SDF to occupy even more.