Middle East: after the capture of a Syrian, the IDF says it has foiled the plans of an “Iranian terrorist network”

The Israeli army announced on Sunday that it had foiled attack plans by an “Iranian terrorist network” after the capture “in recent months” in Syria of one of its members who was transferred to Israel, according to a press release.

“During a special intelligence operation on Syrian territory that took place in recent months, soldiers (…) arrested a member of an Iranian terrorist network in Syria,” the army said, without specifying the date or place of its capture.

According to this press release, the suspect, a Syrian citizen, Ali Soleiman al-Assi, lived in the south of the country. “Its activities included collecting information on Israeli army troops in the border area in preparation for future terrorist activities of the network,” the IDF said on X.

The man was transferred and interrogated in Israel. This operation made it possible, according to the army, “to prevent an attack and led to the revelation of the operational methods of Iranian terrorist networks located near the Golan Heights”.

On July 19, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) reported that “Israeli forces arrested a citizen who worked as a driver to transport milk to the capital, Damascus, in the village of al-Razatiya », in the south of the southern province of Qouneitra, bordering the Syrian Golan Heights occupied by Israel.

“An Israeli military force made up of three cars and an armored vehicle crossed the border, entered the village and took the man into the occupied Syrian Golan,” added the OSDH, based in the United Kingdom and which has a vast network of sources in the country at war.

Damascus has tried to stay out of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. But rocket fire, from groups affiliated with Lebanese Hezbollah, was reported from Syria against the part of the Golan occupied by Israel.

Pro-Iranian Hezbollah also bombs northern Israel and the occupied Golan from Lebanese territory, in support of Palestinian Hamas.

The Golan Heights were partly conquered by Israel from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and two-thirds annexed in December 1981.