Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, placed 10 leaders of Lebanon’s Hezbollah on their terrorism lists on Wednesday, including Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his deputy Naim Qassem, Saudi state news agency SPA said.
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said Wednesday that a decision has not yet been made on supplying Syria with advanced air defense systems, a development that Israel fears could hamper its efforts to prevent Iranian military entrenchment in Syrian territory and transfers of arms supplies to the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon.
The Israeli military was in a state of high alert in the country’s north Monday, in readiness for possible retaliation by Iran over alleged Israeli strikes on its sites in Syria. Security forces are preparing for the possibility of attempted infiltrations of military bases and communities in the north, Hadashot TV news reported.
The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah on Monday praised provisional parliamentary election results as vindicating his Shiite group’s armed operations.
Shi’ite militia groups in Syria are the ones likely to carry out a strike on Israel on behalf of Iran, giving Tehran the ability to deny its role in the attack, according to leading regional experts.
Hezbollah was poised to seal its dominance of Lebanon Monday with results for the decade’s first general election expected to confirm the Iran-backed party as the main winner.
Iran is planning to retaliate for recent deadly airstrikes in Syria attributed to the Jewish state by having its proxies fire missiles at military targets in northern Israel sometime in the near future, defense officials warned on Sunday.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has warned Syrian’s civil war may be about to escalate and enter a new phase.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday that Iran’s destabilizing actions in Syria risk an escalation with Israel that could spark a larger regional conflict.
The head of the Iranian army on Saturday said Iranian forces were working to ‘annihilate’ Israel and predicted they would achieve success within 25 years.
A senior U.S. official disclosed this week that American personnel have been stationed in the Lebanese Armed Forces, or LAF, a contested fighting force that is closely aligned with the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah, according to testimony this week that has caused alarm in Congress and with regional experts.
Iranian-backed militants are operating across the United States mostly unfettered, raising concerns in Congress and among regional experts that these ‘sleeper cell’ agents are poised to launch a large-scale attack on the American homeland, according to testimony before lawmakers.
Syria’s air defense system responded to a missile attack on the Shayrat airbase in the city of Homs early Tuesday morning Hezbollah and Syrian army sources reported, according to Lebanon’s Daily Star. The missiles were intercepted and shot down, the report claims.
With Russia considering supplying the S-300 surface-to- air missile systems to Syria, Israel’s air superiority is at risk of being challenged in one of its most difficult arenas.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah pointed on Friday to an Israeli air strike against a Syrian air base that killed some Iranian Revolutionary Guards, saying it opened the prospect of conflict between the two enemy states.
A possibility of US-led strike on Syria appeared to gain traction Wednesday with President Donald Trump warning that ‘missiles will be coming’ in response to an alleged chemical attack in Syria, and the White House confirming that ‘a number of options’ were being discussed.
In recent months, Israel-Iran tensions have evolved from covert and proxy battles to direct confrontations. Early Monday, Israel targeted the Syrian regime’s T-4 military air base in Homs, killing at least seven Iranian personnel. One of the fatalities was a colonel with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), responsible for overseeing Iran’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) unit. The IRGC ordered Iranian state-affiliated media outlets to retract articles describing the incident.
A top Iranian cleric in Tehran has warned Israel that if it “dares” to attack Hezbollah, the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa would be ‘razed to the ground,’ Iranian media outlets reported on Friday. The Islamic cleric referred to recent remarks by Israeli officials concerning the possibility of a potential conflict with the terrorist organization in Lebanon in 2018.
Jerusalem must prepare for the possibility that Iran will deploy Hezbollah against Israel in case there is a US-Iran military confrontation, Construction Minister Yoav Gallant said on Tuesday.
The Israel Defense Forces and US military ended their joint Juniper Cobra missile defense exercise this week, with live-fire tests of two anti-aircraft systems over the skies of central Israel.