Israeli drone strike on a truck wounds a driver at Beit Jinn

Syria's foreign ministry said an Israeli drone struck a civilian vehicle on Saturday in the town of Beit Jinn, in the countryside west of Damascus, wounding several people. It condemned the attack in the strongest terms and said it amounted to a flagrant violation of Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity and a breach of international law.

Syrian state media reported that the vehicle hit was a small delivery truck, struck on the road that runs between the town and the farmland beside it, and that the man at the wheel was wounded. Neighbours who heard the blast carried him to hospital, and a medical source described his condition as stable, with an injury to his right hand. The state news agency put the number of wounded at one without giving further detail.

The Israeli military confirmed that it carried out the strike. It said the man it targeted had been advancing an attack that was in its final stages of preparation and posed an immediate threat to Israeli forces operating in southern Syria. It gave no evidence for that account, and residents quoted locally said the man works as a driver delivering goods and orders.

The ministry said the strike was one of a series and held Israel fully responsible for what follows from them, warning that continued attacks would deepen instability in the region and put civilians at risk. It called on the Security Council and other states to shoulder their legal and political responsibilities and bring the attacks to a halt.

Beit Jinn sits near Jabal al-Sheikh, some 55km from Damascus, and has been hit repeatedly over the past year. A ground raid there late in November killed 13 civilians, and Israeli troops came under fire during it, with six soldiers wounded, three of them seriously. Residents said reconnaissance drones had been flying over the area for four days before Saturday's strike.

Muhsen al-Mustafa, a security researcher at the Omran Center for Strategic Studies in Damascus, read the strike as a message to the Syrian government, which he said Israel treats — the south in particular — as a security zone whose vacuums it means to fill. He linked it to the strikes days earlier on an air base in Idlib province in the north, which he said showed the zone Israel claims is not confined to the border area, and suggested a drone was chosen over troops on the ground because of the losses taken in November.

Israel has held most of the Golan Heights since 1967. After the fall of the Assad government in late 2024 it declared the 1974 agreement on separating forces void and moved into the demilitarised buffer zone and beyond it, including the Syrian side of Mount Hermon, and has since struck weapons stores and military sites across the country. A Syrian diplomatic source said Damascus remains committed to de-escalation and is seeking a security arrangement with Israel through American mediation, on the basis of that same 1974 agreement.