Israeli Airstrikes Disable Main Syrian Airports as Death Toll From Hamas Terror Attack Surpasses 1300
“Alleged Israeli airstrikes targeted the international airports in Aleppo and Damascus, putting both out of service on Thursday.”
As military operation against Hamas enters the 6th day, the Israeli military carried out airstrikes on the Syrian airports of Aleppo and Damascus. Both airports, previously linked to Iranian weapons supply to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, were knocked out of service by the strike, Syrian state media confirmed.
The simultaneous strikes on Thursday morning took place ahead of the Iranian foreign minister’s trip to Syria, forcing his plane to land in Baghdad, Iraq. Besides Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, Syria is a key ally for Iran. Iran’s Islamic Guard (IRGC) and Hezbollah have set up bases in the country. Iran’s forward military buildup in recent years suggest that Tehran wants to turns Israel’s northern border with Lebanon and Syria into a staging ground for future terrorist attacks and incursions.
Israeli Air Force attacked positions near Damascus airport.
The plane, flying from Iran to Syria, was forced to turn around.
According to some reports, the Iranian Regime’s Foreign Minister is scheduled to fly to Syria tomorrow.#Israel pic.twitter.com/WrC6g5K4Mw— Pouria Zeraati (@pouriazeraati) October 12, 2023
Diverting from its standard practice of confidentiality, Israel admitting hitting Syria’s two main airports linked to Iranian weapons transfer to terrorists, the Israeli media reported. The official admission shows Israel is willing to openly take on Iran and its proxies following Saturday’s terrorist attack carried out by Iranian-sponsored terrorist group Hamas.
Israel has taken the rare step of acknowledging its air-strikes on targets in Syria @jregevi24news explains the reasoning behind Israel taking responsibility after striking the international airports in Aleppo and Damascus pic.twitter.com/IxCfY1nHIc
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) October 12, 2023
Meanwhile the Israeli death toll in Hamas’s multi-pronged terror onslaught surpassed 1300. The number of Israeli hostages, among them women, toddlers and elderly, has risen to 200. “Over 1,300 people — most of them civilians — were killed, according to the latest toll, more than 3,300 injured, and an estimated 200 were captured and taken to the Gaza Strip,” the Times of Israel reported Thursday morning.
Describing the strength of the shock terrorist attack staged from Gaza, the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS noted that “There were about 2,500 to 3,5000 Hamas terrorists involved in the brutal assault. Approximately 1,500 of them were killed in Israeli territory.”
The Jerusalem Post reported the IDF strike in Syria:
Alleged Israeli airstrikes targeted the international airports in Aleppo and Damascus, putting both out of service on Thursday, according to Syrian state media.
According to the reports, the strikes targeted the runways at the airports.
“This aggression is a desperate attempt by the criminal Israeli enemy to divert attention from the crimes it is committing in Gaza and the huge losses it suffers at the hands of the Palestinian resistance, which is part of the ongoing approach to supporting extremist terrorist groups that the Syrian army is fighting in the north of the country, which constitute an armed arm of the Israeli entity,” said a “military source” to the Syrian state news agency SANA.
During the strikes, an Iranian Mahan Air flight that was about to land in Syria turned back to Tehran. Mahan Air has been shown to transport weapons, operatives, and funds for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah.
The Damascus International Airport and the Aleppo International Airport are frequently used by Iran to transfer weapons, equipment, and operative to its proxies in the region, including Hezbollah.
Additionally, during the strikes, a plane on which Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was in the air heading out of Iran, landing shortly afterward in Baghdad. The foreign minister is reportedly expected to visit Lebanon in the coming days.
IDF hits perpetrators of Hamas terror attack
Meanwhile, the IDF carried out overnight strikes against Hamas masterminds and perpetrators of Saturday’s cross-border terror attack.
The Israeli military disclosed the details of the counter-terrorism operations in a statement obtained by the Legal Insurrection:
[T]he IDF conducted a wave of strikes targeting the Nukhba elite forces of the Hamas terrorist organization, by striking operational command centers used by operatives who infiltrated the communities surrounding the Gaza Strip last Saturday.
The Nukhba elite forces consist of terrorists selected by senior Hamas operatives, designated to carry out terrorist attacks such as ambushes, raids, assaults, infiltration through terror tunnels, as well as anti-tank missile, rocket, and sniper fire. The Nukhba elite forces were one of the leading forces that infiltrated the State of Israel in order to carry out murderous acts of terror against its citizens.
Furthermore, IDF aircraft struck Muhammad Abu Shamla, a senior Hamas naval operative in the Rafah Brigade. Abu Shamla’s residence was used to store naval weapons designated for terror against the State of Israel.
War against Hamas—operational update day 6. pic.twitter.com/GomMcR9rVB
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 12, 2023
Hamas terrorists carried ISIS flags
During Saturday’s attack, the Hamas terrorists carried the flags of the Islamic State as they moved door to door slaughtering, raping and capturing helpless civilians, social media report say. The IDF on Thursday acknowledged the recovery of at least one ISIS flag at a massacre site in southern Israel.
The i24NEWS TV reported:
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, revealed on Thursday that thousands participated in Saturday’s surprise attack and the Hamas terrorists hung an ISIS flag in at least one location.
Israeli soldiers found the ISIS flag among the equipment of the Hamas terrorist, after rescuing Kibbutz Sufa, the IDF confirmed on Thursday, following previous reports from the previous day. An official photo was provided for the press.
The other day we saw a @CommunityNotes claim that "Hamas can't be ISIS because ISIS hate Hamas".
More ridiculousness. We are not merely drawing a comparison. They literally brought ISIS flags with them to the communities they slaughtered. pic.twitter.com/eTKirqAep3
— The Mossad: Satirical, Yet Awesome (@TheMossadIL) October 12, 2023
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Comments
Many of our leftists will either deny the ISIS flag and say the Israelis planted it or say it means this isn’t really Hamas. Anything to let themselves continue to support this evil.
And even if they’re presented with irrefutable evidence that it was Hamas, they’ll fall back on the old, tired, “Israel is an apartheid state and deserved it.”
Their heads are empty except for that broken record.
Well, at least Gary Johnson should be able to answer questions about Aleppo if he ever gets around to running for president again.
Unfortunately, it showed that the Libertarian Party wasn’t ready for prime time.
A Gary Johnson? What is a Gary Johnson?
He lived down the block from me and we played a lot of baseball together if it’s the GJ who was my neighbor. Great hands at 3rd base but couldn’t hit a curve ball.
Airports, like railroads, are easy to repair.
Airports may be easy to repair. That’s what sets them apart from your brain.
Anything is easy for the man who does not have to do it himself. Airports can be taken out of operation in fairly easy to repair ways, and in ways that make it almost easier to build another airport with cratering munitions and delay fuses, involving massive fires in the refueling area and heaved concrete on the runways and taxiways. I suspect Israel used the ‘nice’ method. This time.
That depends on the extent of the damage. I seriously doubt the IDF intended for the airports to be out of commission permanently (as georgfelis said, “This time.”), but they need to delay or keep out as much Iranian weaponry and personnel as possible while they deal with their northern front.
So maybe the runways are back in service in a week or two. That’s a week or two that Israel’s northern enemies will have a much harder time resupplying, and we’ve seen in the past, the IDF can accomplish a lot in that amount of time.
(And no offense, but you definitely don’t know railroads that well. A bombed section of rail on the ground might be relatively easy to repair in a few days, but a trestle bridge over a gorge is not; depending on the size and location [some are pretty remote], it could take months or years to restore.)
ISIS and Hamas are both motivated by Islamic supremacism, Jew-hate and jihadist imperatives to wage war against Jews and other non-Muslims.
Shia and Sunni Muslims have been fighting for centuries, and still boast plenty of Jew-haters and genocidal fanatics among them. The notion that internecine conflict among Islamic sects or terrorist groups over theological differences or political jockeying means that they can’t be lumped together as groups united in evil purpose, is utterly absurd.
Correct. My read is that ISIS/ISIL and Hamas are like any other “warring tribes” throughout history. They fight amongst themselves until a larger enemy appears. When that happens they’ll temporarily set aside their (minor) differences and cooperate against that larger enemy until it’s defeated, and then they’ll go back to fighting amongst themselves again.
It happened in feudal Japan any time the Chinese invaded (which they did repeatedly, thinking the clans’ in-fighting would mean an easy conquest), in America when Europeans encountered less-peaceful indigenous tribes, and even in the Middle East during the Crusades.
As I understand it, Shia and Sunni Muslims disagree on some doctrinal questions and the succession of the title of “prophet” after Mohammed’s death. They do NOT disagree that Jews and Western culture (read: Israel and America) are the biggest enemies to Islam. Faced with the larger enemy, they’ll work together to destroy it.
Well=stated, and, your last paragraph underscores the crucial point.
You might have been correct decades ago. Today that ‘unity’ is broken. You also have to overlay the Nation State interests. Turkey isn’t Saudi which isn’t Iran which isn’t Indonesia which isn’t Bosnia which isn’t Pakistan which isn’t Egypt which isn’t Tunisia which isn’t Afghanistan and so on. Each has different National goals/aspirations, cultural/historical priorities and far different levels of education and vastly different levels dependency in tourism, exports, imports which tie them into the modern world.
Then there’s basic cultural and historical context that comes into play. Iran is the descendant of Persia with all the cultural arrogance that holds as well as being Shia. They look down their nose at the Saudi for cultural/historical reasons outside of the fact that the Saudis are Sunni. The entirety of the more cosmopolitan Levant look down on the ‘backwards’ Arabs. All of them seem to look down on the Iraqis.
IMO the modern era high water mark of unity in the Islamic world was the first 25-30 years post recognition of Israel. That was a big, disruptive rock thrown into their pond and they all, for a while, were able to put aside their very real differences and unify around the goal of destroying Israel. When that failed time and again the temporary unity was lost. 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’ also played a role in shuffling the Islamic deck. Papering over the very real differences by saying they are Muslims is far too simplistic.
I think you misconstrued what I wrote. I didn’t state that theological, cultural or political differences don’t exist in the Islamic world. Muslims comprise ~24% of the world population across a slew of different geographies, so, that encompasses a lot of cultural and political differences.
My basic point is that whatever internecine squabbles exist between terrorist groups or malignant Islamic states on opposite sides of the Sunni-Shia divide (or, any other divide), doesn’t and shouldn’t prevent them from being characterized as Jew-hating terrorists in service of evil.
That’s a specific response to the “tweet” cited in this post, in which the “Community Notes” stated that Hamas can’t be ISIS, because they allegedly hate each other — a totally absurd contention.
It isn’t as if Erdogan objects to what Hamas is doing. Erdogan has been busy removing or imprisoning military officers who give a bit too much credence to Kemal Ataturk. Turkey hasn’t gone full Iran yet, but it’s where Erdogan wants to be, and he has an army of millions in Germany to take central Europe, which the Ottoman Empire failed to do at the Siege of Vienna.
Simple minds destroy what strong minds create.
Entropy occurs with and without mans intervention. Strong minds see it and adjust while simple minds adjust while ignoring the blatantly obvious signs of failure of their own design, and assign blame elsewhere.
Hamas must be utterly destroyed, even if that requires the Gaza area be turned into desert.