Jerusalem – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel hadat the weekend carried out an air strike on Iranian weapons in Syria, arare public confirmation of such attacks.

“Just in the last 36 hours the air force attacked Iranian warehousescontaining Iranian weapons in the Damascus international airport,”Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting, according to his office.

“The accumulation of recent attacks shows that we’re more determined thanever to act against Iran in Syria, just as we promised.”

Netanyahu added that Israel had attacked Iranian and Hezbollah targets inSyria hundreds of times.

Israel has pledged to prevent its main enemy Iran from entrenching itselfmilitarily in Syria, where it is backing President Bashar al-Assad’s regimealongside Russia and Hezbollah.

It rarely publicly confirms such strikes, though outgoing military chief ofstaff Gadi Eisenkot has spoken of them in interviews in recent days.

Eisenkot told the New York Times that “we struck thousands of targetswithout claiming responsibility or asking for credit”.

Netanyahu is also facing April 9 elections in Israel and has been seekingto burnish his security credentials.

The strike Netanyahu was referring to occurred on Friday night.

Syrian state news agency SANA cited a military source saying on Fridaynight that Syrian air defences had shot down Israeli missiles, but awarehouse had been hit.

Most of the missiles fired by “Israeli military planes” were intercepted ataround 11:00 pm (2100 GMT), the source said.

“Only a ministry of transport warehouse at Damascus international airportwas hit,” SANA cited the military source as saying.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said “two areas hostingmilitary positions of Iranian forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah movementhave been targeted”.

They were near the airport and around the Kisweh area south of Damascus,said the Britain-based Observatory. -APP/AFP