Syrian air defenses intercepted Israeli missile strikes near Damascus on Friday, according to state media.

“Our air defences stopped a number of hostile missiles in the airspace of the southern countryside of Damascus,” Syria’s official news agency SANA said.

AFP correspondents in the Syrian capital said they heard very loud noises in the evening.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said that the target of the Israeli strikes were Iranian bases near Damascus.

The latest strike follows one on May 13 that killed five soldiers and another one on April 27 which, according to the Observatory, killed 10 combatants, among them six Syrian soldiers, in the deadliest such raid since the start of 2022.

Since civil war broke out in Syria in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes there, targeting government positions as well as positions and weapon depots for allied Iran-backed forces and fighters of Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hezbollah.

While Israel rarely comments on individual strikes, it has acknowledged mounting hundreds of them.

The Israeli military has defended them as necessary to keep Iran from gaining a foothold on its borders.

Syria’s conflict has killed nearly 500,000 people and displaced nearly half of the country’s pre-war population.