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A Day After Exchange With ISIS, Israel Hits Terror Target on Syrian Golan

The Israeli military bombed a facility belonging to an Islamic State-affiliated group in the Syrian side of the Golan Heights on Monday, a day after it killed four of the group’s fighters in a retaliatory airstrike.

Israel Air Force jets hit a former United Nations structure that had served as an operations center for the Army of Khalid Ibn al-Walid, formerly known as the Yarmouk Martyr’s Brigade, whose fighters attacked soldiers from the Golani Brigade’s reconnaissance unit on Sunday. The soldiers came under small arms fire while conducting an operation in Israeli territory near the border with Syria. The IAF was called in after the terrorists began firing mortars at the soldiers, launching an airstrike that killed all four terrorists.

“The compound was the base for yesterday’s attack against IDF forces,” the military said in a statement on Monday. “This is an additional response to yesterday’s attack, and it is aimed at preventing the terrorists from returning to the installation which poses a significant threat.”

“They have said they will come to Jerusalem,” IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said of ISIS, which threatened in October that “not one Jew will be left [alive] in Jerusalem or across Israel.”

“We have no intention of letting them come to Jerusalem,” Lerner added.

While Israel has not actively taken sides in the Syrian civil war, the government has said that it would act to prevent the terrorist group Hezbollah, which backs the Syrian government, from acquiring “game-changing” weapons. Israel also has worked with moderate rebels groups near the border to transfer Syrians injured in the fighting to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

Gen. Amos Yadlin, former head of Israel’s military intelligence and current director of the Institute for National Security Studies, told reporters on Sunday that it is unclear whether the ISIS attack on the IDF patrol was opportunistic or part of a broader escalation. He noted that ISIS, which is currently “under pressure everywhere,” including its bases in Iraq and Syria, may have been looking “some propaganda element, some sympathy in the Arab world” by attacking Israeli forces.

A complete recording of Yadlin’s remarks is embedded below.

[Photo: Israel Defense Forces / Flickr ]