As Israel continues retaliatory military action against Hamas in Gaza following the horrific multi-front terror attack on Israel by Hamas on Saturday (7 October), two airports in Syria were reportedly bombed by Israel on 12 October. Citing Syria’s state television, Reuters reported that Israel launched attacks on the main airports in the capital Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo on Thursday.
As per Syrian local channel Sham FM, Syrian air defences were launched in response to both attacks. Citing local reports, Arab News said that the attacks were “simultaneous” and they “damaged landing strips in the two airports, putting them out of service.” The Israeli military has not made any comments on this.
No one was injured in the attacks, state news agency SANA said, quoting an unnamed military source.
Israel keeps hitting targets in Syria, including the Damascus and Aleppo airports, as Syria is used to route weapons to Hamas, Hezbollah and other Palestinian terror groups. Iran is known to have used Syria to send support to Hamas. It has been reported that Israel targeted the airports to disrupt Iranian supplies to Syria.
In the meanwhile, there are claims on social media that Israel struck the airports just before an Iranian flight carrying weapons was to land at Damascus.
It has been claimed that an Airbus 340 flight from Tehran to Damascus was carrying Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, several commanders of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and tons of anti-tank missiles for Hezbollah. As the airport was bombed, the flight had to return, as per the claims.
However, later it was confirmed that the Iranian Foreign Minister was not in the Iranian plane during the Israeli air attack on the Damascus airport. The minister reportedly landed at Baghdad airport in a different flight as part of his visit to Iraq. He is scheduled to visit Syria from Iraq later.
But an Iranian flight headed for Damascus did return to Tehran due to the bombing of the airport. Flight tracking site Flightradar24 shows that a flight that took off from Tehran made a U-turn near Damascus, returned to Tehran and landed back in Tehran.
It shows that Mahan Air flight W5146 took off from Tehran at around 2:48 PM Indian Time and crossed the Iraq-Syria border at 4:30 PM IST. However, the aircraft took a U-turn inside Syria after a few minutes and returned to Iran. It landed at Tehran airport at around 6:10 PM IST on Thursday.