Alleged Israeli strikes in the predawn darkness hit military sites near Damascus, causing damage, Syria said Tuesday, as a war monitor claimed Hezbollah arms depots were targeted in the attack.

A military source quoted by Syria’s state-run SANA media outlet said Israeli “air aggression” had targeted several military positions near Damascus at 2:10 a.m.

“Our air defenses took action and shot down several missiles,” the source said. The report said the strikes had caused “material losses,” without elaborating.

Syria is thought to regularly inflate the effectiveness of its air defenses against Israeli strikes, which have repeatedly targeted areas around the country as part of a decade-long campaign to stymie weapons transfers to the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon and keep Iran-backed fighters from getting a foothold near Israel’s border.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes targeted warehouses storing weapons for Hezbollah.

The UK-based opposition watchdog, which has been accused of exaggerating the effectiveness of Israeli strikes, said the attack destroyed weapons and ammunition, causing secondary explosions and fires.

The Observatory said it was the second such strike in two days, coming after raids on Sunday hit another Hezbollah weapons depot and a separate site near Damascus.

Earlier this month, an Israeli strike reportedly killed an Iranian Revolutionary Guard and two other people in Baniyas on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

The Israel Defense Forces said last week it had hit about 4,500 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon and Syria since the start of the ongoing war in Gaza.

According to the IDF’s estimates, more than 300 Hezbollah operatives have been killed, including five senior commanders, and 750 have been wounded by Israeli strikes across five months of daily skirmishes along the border.

Israel has for years carried out attacks on what it has described as Iran-linked targets in Syria, where Tehran’s influence has grown since it began supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad in a civil war that started in 2011, but rarely comments on them publicly.

Since the Hamas terror group’s brutal October 7 massacres, which saw some 1,200 people killed in Israel and 253 kidnapped, mostly civilians, Israel has escalated its strikes on Iranian-backed terror targets in Syria and has also struck Syrian army air defenses and some Syrian forces.

Starting October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the Lebanese border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza and the Hamas terror group, which Israel has vowed to destroy.

According to Israel’s military, since war broke out it has hit weapons depots, buildings used by Hezbollah for attacks, more than 150 observation posts along the border, some 70 command centers where terror operatives were gathered, more than 50 significant rocket launching positions, and dozens of squads carrying out anti-tank missile attacks.

Hezbollah has named more than 240 members who have been killed by Israel since October 8. Another 40 operatives from other terror groups have also been killed in strikes on southern Lebanon, as well as a Lebanese soldier and at least 30 civilians, three of whom were journalists.

The near-daily exchange of fire along the shared Israel-Lebanon border has killed seven civilians in Israel and 10 IDF soldiers and reservists.

Emanuel Fabian contributed to this report.