Israel strikes Syrian army headquarters in Damascus and moves troops from Gaza to northern border

SYRIA’S HEALTH MINISTRY said a series of Israeli strikes targeting the army and defence ministry headquarters in Damascus killed one person and wounded another 18 today.

Israel said it bombed the headquarters after warning the Islamist-led government to leave the Druze minority alone in its Sweida heartland, where a the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says sectarian clashes have killed more than 300 people.

The strikes destroyed part of a four-storey building adjacent to the defence ministry, while the city’s usually bustling Umayyad Square nearby was empty except for ambulances and military vehicles.

An Israeli military spokesperson also told reporters during a briefing that some soldiers were “preparing to be deployed on our northern border with Syria” from Gaza.

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Syria said a new ceasefire was reached today in Sweida, a day after an earlier truce collapsed amid days of violence.

“An agreement was reached for a ceasefire in Sweida and the deployment of security checkpoints in the city,” an unidentified interior ministry source said in a statement carried by state news agency SANA.

The observatory said that since clashes erupted on Sunday, 69 Druze fighters were killed.

40 civilians were also killed, 27 of whom were in “summary executions… by members of the defence and interior ministries”, while 165 government forces and 18 Bedouin fighters were also killed, along with 10 members of the government’s security forces in Israeli strikes.

Images released by the Kurdish media outlet Rudaw show an Israeli air strike hitting the Syrian army headquarters in Damascus during its live coverage, with the reporter screaming and running for cover as a massive cloud of smoke billows into the sky. 

With reporting from AFP