Officials: Israel launches Syria airstrike

Israel launched an airstrike into Syria, apparently targeting a suspected weapons site, US officials said.

The strike occurred overnight Thursday into Friday (local time), the officials told The Associated Press. It did not appear that a chemical weapons site was targeted, they said, and one official said the strike appeared to have hit a warehouse.

The US officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the matter publicly.

Israel has targeted weapons in the past that it believes are being delivered to the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah. Earlier this week, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said his group would assist Syrian President Bashar Assad if needed in the effort to put down a 2-year-old uprising.

Israeli Embassy spokesman Aaron Sagui would not comment Friday night specifically on the report of an Israeli strike into Syria.

"What we can say is that Israel is determined to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons or other game-changing weaponry by the Syrian regime to terrorists, specially to Hezbollah in Lebanon," Sagui said in an email to the AP.

In 2007, Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear reactor site along the Euphrates River in northeastern Syria, an attack that embarrassed and jolted the Assad regime and led to a build-up of the Syrian air defence system. Russia provided the hardware for the defence systems upgrade and continues to be a reliable supplier of military equipment to the Assad regime.

The new strike came hours before President Barack Obama told reporters at a news conference in Costa Rica on Friday that he didn't foresee a scenario in which the US would send troops to Syria.

More than 70,000 peoples have died and hundreds of thousands have fled the country as the Assad regime has battled rebels.

- AP