A man on a motorcycle in front of the Great Mosque of Qousseir, Syria, in August 2013. (Credit: AFP / JOSEPH EID)
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported Thursday that ten people, mostly civilians, were killed in Israeli strikes in Qousseir, Syria, near the Lebanese border. Israel claims it struck “weapons warehouses” belonging to Hezbollah.
The SOHR, based in the United Kingdom with a large network of sources in Syria, indicated that three strikes targeted Qousseir, where Lebanese Hezbollah is heavily present, as well as neighboring areas, later reporting additional strikes in the region.
The SOHR specified that one of the strikes hit “a weapons depot and a Hezbollah fuel warehouse in the industrial zone of Qousseir,” killing seven civilians and three Syrian fighters aligned with Lebanese Hezbollah.
Other warehouses were hit along the Syrian-Lebanese border, as well as a bridge south of the city, according to SOHR.
Sarah Abdallah, the Bekaa correspondent for L'Orient-Le Jour, reported in the morning that one strike targeted the village of Hoch al-Sayyed Ali in the Hermel region, located along the border opposite Qousseir.
Hezbollah's al-Radwan Force HQ
The Israeli military said in a statement that it carried out airstrikes in Qousseir targeting “weapons warehouses and command centers used by the al-Radwan force,” Hezbollah’s elite unit. It added that it had conducted strikes “in recent months” to “reduce weapons transfers from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon via Syria.”
The official Syrian news agency Sana reported that “Israeli aggression caused damage in the industrial area and some residential neighborhoods of Qousseir, in the Homs region (central Syria).”
Israel has intensified strikes in recent days on border areas with passages between Lebanon and Syria, disabling two main border crossings. The Israeli military claims Hezbollah uses these routes to transport weapons from Syria.
More than half a million people have fled Lebanon to Syria since Hezbollah and Israel entered open warfare on September 23, according to Lebanese authorities.
Since the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011, Israel has conducted hundreds of strikes in the country targeting the Syrian military and Tehran-backed groups, particularly Hezbollah, deployed in support of government forces.
