Israeli jets strike in Syria after rockets hit Golan Heights

Israeli fighter jets targets Syrian regime’s military outposts after rockets fired from Syria landed in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Tuesday, Al Arabiya correspondent in the Golan reported.

The escalation came nine days after an Israeli air strike in Syria killed several Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas and an Iranian general.

An Israeli military spokesman earlier said the army ordered the evacuation of Israel’s Mt. Hermon ski resort on the Golan Heights after the rockets struck.

It was not immediately known who launched the rockets into the Golan Heights. Israel’s Channel Two TV said there were no casualties and that Israeli forces returned fire.

In the Israeli air strike on a Hezbollah convoy near the Golan Heights on Jan. 18, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general, Mohammad Allahdadi, was killed along with a Hezbollah commander and the son of the group’s late military leader, Imad Moughniyeh.

Both Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran and fought a 34-day war with Israel in 2006, and the Revolutionary Guards vowed to avenge the deaths.

Troops and civilians in northern Israel and the Golan Heights have been on heightened alert and Israel has deployed an Iron Dome rocket interceptor unit near the Syrian border.

Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war. Mortar shells and rockets have struck the heights numerous times during Syria’s nearly four-year-old civil war.

Israel has said some of those incidents deliberately targeted its soldiers while others were a spillover from fighting between rebels and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Al Arabiya