Syria - IDF targeted Fateh 110 "missiles in transit to Hezbollah from Iran".

Syria - IDF targeted Fateh 110 "missiles in transit to Hezbollah from Iran".(JPost).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 it of carrying out a raid on a military facility just north of the capital The target of Sunday's attack, according to Syrian media, was the same Jamraya military research center which was hit by Israel in January. Jamraya, on the northern approaches to Damascus, is just 15 km (10 miles) from the Lebanese border.

The Western intelligence source said 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.

The Observatory said the blasts hit Jamraya as well as a nearby ammunition depot. Other activists said a missile brigade and two Republican Guard battalions may also have been targeted in the heavily militarised area just north of Damascus. Israel has repeatedly made clear it is prepared to use force to prevent advanced weapons from Syria reaching Lebanon's Shi'ite Muslim Hezbollah guerrillas, who fought a 34-day war with Israel in 2006. Assad and Hezbollah are allied to Iran, Israel's arch-enemy.

Uzi Rubin, an Israeli missile expert and former defense official said the Fateh-110 missile "is better than the Scud, it has a half-ton warhead". Iran has said it adapted the missile for anti-ship use by installing a guidance system, he added.

With Assad battling a more than two-year-old insurgency, the Israelis also worry that the Sunni Islamist rebels could loot his arsenals and eventually hit Israel, ending four decades of relative cross-border calm.

Speaking shortly before Sunday's reported attack, President Barack Obama said Israel had a right to act to defend itself. "The Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organization like Hezbollah," he told Telemundo network during a tour of Latin America.Read the full story here, more here from Carl in Jerusalem.