Israel carried out airstrikes against the Aleppo International Airport on Wednesday night, Syria’s state-run SANA news agency claimed.
According to SANA, the airstrikes caused damage to the airport in northern Syria. It did not provide further details.
There were no immediate reports of injuries in the alleged attack.
Images published on social media appeared to show several fires in the area.
Aleppo is a major city in northern Syria, near its border with Turkey, and is an uncommon — though not unprecedented — site for reported Israeli airstrikes.
The last reported Israeli strikes in the area were in July 2021.
#حلب: استهداف مطار حلب الدولي بعدد من الصواريخ والأضرار اقتصرت على الماديات pic.twitter.com/g7quVGkGG5
— أخبار سوريا الوطن Syrian ???????? (@SyriawatanNews) August 31, 2022
As a rule, Israel’s military does not comment on specific strikes in Syria, but has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country. It says it also attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups, chief among them Lebanese Hezbollah.
According to Aurora Intel, a network that provides news and updates based on open-source intelligence, a sanctioned Iranian cargo plane landed at the Aleppo airport earlier Wednesday.
#Iran|ian OFAC sanctioned EP-GOX Yas Air Cargo landed in Aleppo earlier today it seems. pic.twitter.com/G8JcczzR3Y
— Aurora Intel (@AuroraIntel) August 31, 2022
Earlier this year, airstrikes attributed to Israel caused major damage to the Damascus International Airport, halting all air traffic for two weeks.
Generally, relatively large weapons are thought to be smuggled via Syria on Iranian cargo airlines, which frequently land at Damascus International and the Tiyas, or T-4, airbase, outside of the central Syrian city of Palmyra. The weaponry is then believed to be stored in warehouses in the area before being trucked to Lebanon.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor with unclear funding, immediately claimed Wednesday’s airstrike targeted four warehouses “likely” containing shipments of Iranian missiles.
The unverified claim was picked up by Hebrew language media, despite the fact that the organization, run by a single person, has regularly been accused by Syrian war analysts of false reporting, inflating casualty numbers, as well as inventing them out of whole cloth.
