Israeli missile strike kills soldier in Syria, Syrian state media says

CAIRO (Reuters) -An Israeli air strike killed a soldier in southern Syria on Thursday, Syrian state media reported, in an attack in a frontier area where Israel has expressed concern about deployments of Iran-backed forces.

An Israeli military spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Israel has mounted frequent attacks against what it has described as Iranian targets in Syria, where Tehran-backed forces including Lebanon’s Hezbollah have deployed over the last decade to support President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s war.

Citing a military source, Syrian state news agency SANA said “the Israeli enemy carried out an aerial aggression”, firing missiles from the Golan Heights, territory Israel captured from Syria in 1967.

Syrian air defences shot down most of the rockets, SANA said. The attack led to “the martyrdom of a soldier and some material losses”, it added.

In 2019, then U.S. President Donald Trump broke with other world powers by recognising Israel as sovereign on the Golan Heights, which it annexed in 1981 in a move not recognised internationally.

(Reporting by Enas Alashray in Cairo and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Himani Sarkar and John Stonestreet)