Israel must stop 'spontaneous' Syria strikes: Russia
Russia has called on the Zionist entity to stop its "spontaneous" airstrikes on Syria, days after the Israeli military carried out fresh strikes against targets near the Syrian capital, Damascus.
The illegal Zionist entity has repeatedly attacked Syrian government positions under the pretext that its attacking Iranian military advisers, who are in the country on a request from President Bashar al-Assad to assist the Syrian Army in their fight against foreign-backed terrorists.
"The practice of spontaneous strikes on the territory of a sovereign state, in this case Syria, must end," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Wednesday, according to Russia's TASS state news agency.
Zakharova said such moves by Tel Aviv only fueled tensions in the region and harmed the long-term interests of all regional players, including Israel itself.
"We should prevent turning Syria, which has suffered over the past years of the armed conflict, into an arena of settling geopolitical scores," she added. "And we urge everyone to think about the possible consequences of causing more chaos in the Middle East.”
On Sunday, Syria's SANA state news agency cited an unnamed military official as saying that the country's aerial defenses had managed to “thwart” a daylight missile attack by Israeli warplanes against some localities in and around Damascus, including an airport.
Zakharova also raised concerns about the increasing number of violations of an ongoing ceasefire in Syria's western province of Idlib, which was brokered by Russia and Turkey in September.
“The number of ceasefire violations is increasing. Since the Russian-Turkey memorandum was signed on September 17, more than one thousand such cases were registered with 65 people dead and more than 200 wounded. Thirty ceasefire violations were registered in the last four days,” she said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced in Sochi on September 17 that they had agreed to create a demilitarized buffer zone in Idlib, which would be protected by Turkish and Russian soldiers.
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