On Friday, Syrian authorities announced that air defense systems had been activated and intercepted Israeli missiles in the vicinity of the capital Damascus, the first such strike in more than a month.

“The Israeli enemy launched airstrikes from the northeast on targets near Damascus,” the Syrian Defense Ministry said in a statement. According to the same source, most of the missiles were intercepted.

Earlier, the official Syrian news agency SANA reported that air defense systems intercepted “missile strikes in the airspace of Damascus and its southern suburbs.”

The raid targeted Syrian military installations near Damascus International Airport south of the capital, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based NGO.

An Israeli strike near Damascus in September killed five Syrian soldiers.

In June, another closed the airport in the Syrian capital for two weeks.

Aleppo airport was attacked by Israel in August and September.

Since the start of the war in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes, the vast majority of them from the air, against the positions of the Syrian government and its allies, Iranian and pro-Iranian armed groups, in particular the Shiite paramilitary group Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Jewish state rarely acknowledges or publicly comments on these strikes, but often says it will not allow Iran, its nemesis, to build a foothold or expand its influence in Syrian territory.

The complex war in Syria over the past eleven years, which has involved foreign forces and jihadist groups, has claimed the lives of at least half a million people, destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and displaced millions of people and refugees.

AFP-Reuters