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Israeli strike kills 42 Syrian soldiers

DAMASCUS — Israeli raids on Syrian targets at the weekend killed at least 42 soldiers, a watchdog said on Monday, as UN chief Ban Ki-moon and the European Union warned against a spillover of the conflict.

UN human rights investigator Carla del Ponte, meanwhile, said that rebels have used the deadly nerve agent sarin in their fight to oust Syria’s regime.

“At least 42 soldiers were killed in the strikes, and another 100 who would usually be at the targeted sites remain unaccounted for,”

Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman said.The group earlier gave a death toll of 15 in the strikes, which came early on Sunday and were the Jew-ish state’s second reported attacks on Syria in 48 hours.

A senior Israeli source said the raids targeted Iranian weapons destined for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Iran and Hezbol-lah are steadfast allies of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s re-gime, and arch-foes of Israel.UN leader Ban warned against any escalation of a conflict that has killed more than 70,000 people in Syria since it erupted in March 2011. “The secretary-general calls on all sides to exercise maximum calm and restraint, and to act with a sense of responsibility to prevent an escala-tion of what is already a devastating and highly dangerous conflict,” his spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

“The secretary-general urges re-spect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries in the region, and adherence to all rel-evant Security Council resolutions.”

Ban spoke by telephone with Arab League chief Nabil Al Arabi, whose 22-member bloc demanded UN Security Council intervention to stop such Israeli attacks.

Egypt condemned the raids as a “violation” of international law, Brit-ain warned of “increasing danger” to the Middle East, and France called for a political solution to the conflict. The EU also said it feared recent de-velopments “risk dragging the re-gion into an expanding conflict”.

Russia, the Assad regime’s most powerful ally, said it was “especial-ly” concerned by the Israeli strikes, warning they threatened neighbour-ing Lebanon. And China implicitly criticised the strikes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ar-rived in Shanghai, saying “we are opposed to the use of force and be-lieve that the sovereignty of any country should be respected”.

The Syrian regime’s main re-gional ally Iran said the strikes would shorten Israel’s existence, and denied the weapons targeted were from the Islamic republic.

A Syrian official in Damascus, reached by phone from Beirut, warned “Syria will respond to the Israeli aggression and will choose the moment to do so”.

“It might not be immediate be-cause Israel now is on high alert,” he added. “We will wait but we will answer.”

A diplomatic source in Beirut said the sites were the Jamraya military facility, a nearby weapons depot and an anti-aircraft unit in Sabura, west of the capital.

Sunday’s strike came about 48 hours after a reported Israeli raid on a weapons storage facility at Damascus airport.