The Israeli military confirmed on Jan. 2 that months before the Assad regime’s fall, its special forces had raided an underground missile manufacturing site in Syria.
The Iranian manufacturing site was designed to produce hundreds of strategic missiles per year for use by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group against Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stated.
The site, dug into the side of a mountain, had been under observation by Israeli intelligence since 2017 and was about to become operational, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an IDF spokesman, said.
As such, it would produce precision-guided long-range missiles, some with ranges up to 190 miles, and constituted “an immediate threat,” Shoshani said.
The raid, on the night of Sept. 8, 2024, lasted for hours. Shoshani described it as “one of the more complex operations the IDF has done in recent years,” coordinated between special forces, the navy, and the air force.
The raid was accompanied by air strikes involving dozens of aircraft and about 100 helicopter-borne troops, who located weapons and seized documents.
“At the end of the raid, the troops dismantled the facility, including the machines and the manufacturing equipment themselves,” Shoshani said. Doing so was “key to ensure the safety of Israel.”
The facility was located near Masyaf, in Hama Province, north of Lebanon, about 20 miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea and about 120 miles north of the Israeli border.
Israel had accused the regime of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of helping Hezbollah receive arms from Iran. Before his regime was toppled on Dec. 8, 2024, by rebels led by the Turkish-backed Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham terrorist group, the IDF had hit targets in Syria to interdict arms shipments.
After Dec. 8, the IDF bombed numerous Syrian military sites to keep its weaponry out of the hands of rebels.
In September, Syrian media reported that Israeli airstrikes killed at least 16 people in the country’s west.
Before the raid, IDF Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi briefed soldiers of the elite Shaldag unit, also known as Unit 5101. He addressed the mission’s pros and cons.
“On the one hand, we are sending in a large force to a distant area,” he said in remarks released by the IDF.
On the other hand, he said, he had watched the mission’s planning develop over several months from initial planning to testing, and he concluded, “It was operationally possible. I think the level of preparedness here is exceptionally high.”
He described the missile plant’s function and how the large number of missiles would threaten Israel’s security.
“These missiles would be sent to different places and land in various hands, and we have no intention of allowing that to happen,” Halevi said.
He said his commanders’ confidence in the mission’s success and his trust in them figured into his approval of the action.
