Israel carried out its second air strike in days on Syria early on Sunday, a Western intelligence source said, in an attack that shook Damascus with a series of powerful blasts and drove columns of fire into the night sky. Israel declined to comment, but Syria accused the Jewish state of carrying out a raid on a military facility just north of the capital. The explosions came soon after an Israeli official said his country had carried out an air strike earlier in the week targeting missiles in Syria intended for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. The target of Sunday's attack, according to Syrian media, was the same Jamraya military research center which was hit by Israel in another assault in January. Jamraya, on the northern approaches to Damascus, is just 15 km (10 miles) from the Lebanese border. Video footage uploaded onto the Internet by activists showed a series of explosions. One lit up the skyline over the city, while another sent up a tower of flames and secondary blasts. The Western intelligence source told Reuters Israel carried out the attack and the operation hit Iranian-supplied missiles which were en route to Hezbollah. "In last night's attack, as in the previous one, what was attacked were stores of Fateh-110 missiles that were in transit from Iran to Hezbollah," the source said. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the scale of the attack meant it was beyond the military capability of Syrian rebels, and quoted eyewitnesses in the area as saying they saw jets in the sky at the time of the blasts.
