For 75 minutes on Thursday night, Nov. 29, the IDF blasted Iranian, Hizballah and Syrian targets in its biggest ever surface missile attack on Syria, DEBKAfile’s intelligence and military sources can now reveal. This was not an Israeli air force strike such as those conducted for two years against Iranian targets in Syria. Two kinds of ground-to ground missiles were used in this cross-border offensive: a Long-Range Artillery Weapon system known as LORA which has a range of 400km; and the guided, short range Tamuz. They raked across at least 15 sites, most of them belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), pro-Iranian militias and Hizballah. They covered an area ranging from the Syrian Hermon slopes in the north, down to the Iranian command center at Izra north of Daraa in the south (See attached map.)
Among the locations targeted was Al-Zabadani, a town on the Damascus-Beirut highway near the Lebanese border in the west, which Hizballah has taken over and established there its command posts, training camps and ammunition and rocket depots. At Al Kiswah south of Damascus, the IDF missiles struck Iran’s central command post in Syria, which is known as the “Glass House.”
Blasted too were the command posts and structures of two Syrian brigades which are structured for Syrian officers to command a hodge-podge of Hizballah, pro-Iranian Shiite and Palestinian militias. Israeli missiles also struck the Syrian Army’s 90th Brigade which rules the area north of Quneitra and 112h Brigade which is stationed south of this Golan town.
The massive Israeli cross-border assault inflicted heavy casualties on the Iranians, their militias, Hizballah and the Syrian army, including fatalities. Up until Friday night, neither Iran, Syria nor Hizballah had disclosed the precise targets smashed by the IDF 24 hours earlier. The Russian military in Syria was also silent.