BEIRUT: Israel attacked a military site in Syria’s Hama province early on Thursday, the Syrian army said, and a war monitoring group said the target could be linked to chemical weapons production.

The air strike killed two soldiers and caused damage near the town of Masyaf, an army statement said. It warned of the “dangerous repercussions of this aggressive action to the security and stability of the region”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said the attack was on a facility of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre, an agency which the United States describes as Syria’s chemical weapons manufacturer.

It came the morning after UN investigators said the Syrian government was responsible for a sarin poison gas attack in April.

Syria’s government denies using chemical arms. In 2013 it promised to surrender its chemical weapons, which it says it has done.

The observatory said strikes also hit a military camp next to the centre that was used to store ground-to-ground rockets and where personnel of Iran and its ally, the Lebanese Hezbollah group, had been seen more than once.

An Israeli army spokeswoman declined to discuss reports of a strike in Syria.

In an interview in Israel’s Haaretz daily last month on his retirement, former Israeli air force chief Amir Eshel said Israel had hit arms convoys of the Syrian military and its Hezbollah allies nearly 100 times in the past five years.

Israel sees red lines in the shipment to Hezbollah of anti-aircraft missiles, precision ground-to-ground missiles and chemical weapons.

The reported attack took place on the 10th anniversary of Israel’s destruction of a nuclear reactor in Syria.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to address the UN General Assembly on Sept 19, and is widely expected to voice Israel’s concern over what it sees as attempts by Iran to broaden its military foothold in Syria and threats posed by Hezbollah Israeli officials have said that Russia, another Assad ally, and Israel maintain regular contacts to coordinate military action in Syria.

Some Israeli commentators saw the latest strike — a departure from the previous pattern of attacks on weapons convoys — as a show of Israeli dissatisfaction with the United States and Russia.

Last month, Netanyahu met Russian President Vladimir Putin, but came away without any public statement from Moscow that it would curb Iranian influence.

Hezbollah and Israel fought a brief war in 2006 in which more than 1,300 people died. Both have suggested that any new conflict between them could be on a larger scale than that one.

Hezbollah has been one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most important allies in the war and last month its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said he had recently travelled to Damascus to meet the Syrian president.

Israel is conducting military exercises in the north of the country near the border with Lebanon.

Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli general and former national security adviser, told reporters he assumed Thursday’s strike was linked to Nasrallah’s visit to Damascus.

“Weapons systems have been transferred from this organisation (the Scientific Studies and Research Centre) into the hands of Hezbollah during the years,” he said.

In May, an official in the military alliance backing Assad said that Hezbollah drew a distinction between Israel striking its positions in Syria and at home in Lebanon.

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2017