For the second time in days, the IDF said Monday morning that it carried out an overnight raid in southern Syria, where forces captured a cell of operatives operating on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Reservists of the Alexandroni Brigade and field interrogators of the Military Intelligence Directorate’s Unit 504 operated overnight in the Kwdana area — close to the border and near an IDF post in southern Syria — to detain the cell, the military said.
Several members of the cell who the IDF said were operating on behalf of the IRGC were nabbed.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said Israeli forces raided a village in the Quneitra countryside of southern Syria early Monday and “carried out searches targeting several homes, which ended with the arrest of two brothers.”
On Wednesday, Israel’s military said its forces had apprehended members of an Iranian-backed terrorist cell in southern Syria and seized weapons.
Since Assad’s fall, Israel has carried out strikes and raids in Syria aimed at denying military assets to the Islamist-led interim administration.
It has also deployed troops across the demilitarized zone on the Syrian side of the 1974 armistice line that used to separate the opposing forces on the Golan, with Israeli troops regularly carrying out raids in southern Syria.
The United Nations considers Israel’s takeover of the buffer zone a violation of the 1974 disengagement accord between Israel and Syria. Israel says the accord had fallen apart since one of the sides was no longer in a position to implement it, and that the takeover was a defensive move to protect itself from potential hostile forces that could have exploited the power vacuum.
On June 12, Syria said the Israeli military killed one civilian and detained seven people during an overnight incursion, with the Israeli army saying it seized members of Palestinian terror group Hamas.
Israel has said it is interested in striking normalization agreements with Syria and neighboring Lebanon, but insisted the strategic Golan Heights — which Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and later annexed — would remain part of Israel under any peace accord.
The two countries are currently engaged in “advanced talks” to end official hostilities and resolve the buffer zone issue, a senior Israeli official told The Times of Israel last week.
The contacts are focused on coordination around security matters, said the official, who would not speculate on when a full peace deal between the two enemy states could turn into reality.
The neighboring states have been in conflict for decades, including direct and often bitter combat from the 1948 War of Independence through the 1982 First Lebanon War.