Syria and Turkey condemned Tuesday\u2019s airstrike on the Abu al-Duhur Airbase, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the action by saying Syria had ignored repeated warnings against allowing Turkish troops to deploy at the site.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Syria protested the strikes in letters to the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, which is affiliated with Hezbollah, reported that four runways and other infrastructure at the airfield were damaged. The newspaper described the attack as the third of its kind, following two earlier strikes on military sites in central Syria that Turkey had sought to rehabilitate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The strike also came days after two Syrian aircraft conducted training flights in northern Syria for the first time since the fall of the Assad regime, Al-Akhbar reported. Ankara was participating in rehabilitation work at the airfield at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sources on the ground told the newspaper that two Israeli aircraft entered Syrian airspace from the direction of Lebanon.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Netanyahu\u2019s office said Israel had acted after Damascus allowed Turkish troops to deploy despite previous warnings.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIsrael and Syria had agreed on a security status quo, which Syria nearly violated by allowing Turkish soldiers to deploy at an air base near Aleppo,\u201d Netanyahu\u2019s office said in an English-language statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He added that \u201cIsrael repeatedly warned Syria that such a deployment would pose a threat to Israel\u2019s security. Syria chose to ignore these warnings. Israel will not tolerate threats to its security and would welcome a return to the status quo.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Turkey denied that it was preparing to station forces in Syria and rejected the Israeli account a day after the airbase was struck.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe baseless claims made by the Israeli Prime Minister\u2019s office are intended to legitimize Israel\u2019s illegal airstrikes, which violate Syria\u2019s sovereignty and territorial integrity,\u201d Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan\u2019s office said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Syria and Turkey condemned Tuesday\u2019s airstrike on the Abu al-Duhur Airbase, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589393,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-589392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}