Was Wahhab Target of Israeli Strike near Damascus?

After unconfirmed reports said that the convoy of Arab Tawhid Party chief Wiam Wahhab had “miraculously escaped” the Israeli airstrike that targeted the al-Sabboura area near Damascus at dawn Wednesday, Wahhab's office said it cannot “rule out” the possibility that the ex-minister was the target of the raid.

Wahhab had personally confirmed his presence in Syria in a tweet that preceded the strike.

“During my tour in Damascus today, I saw on the faces of people that they have started to promise themselves with an imminent victory for Syria,” Wahhab tweeted.

In a phone interview with al-Jadeed television, Wahhab's adviser Massoud Abu Diab confirmed that the ex-minister “believes that he has escaped death,” adding that he cannot rule out that Wahhab was the actual target of the Israeli strike.

Abu Diab also noted that Wahhab visits Syria on regular basis to “assess the situations of the Druze community there and to offer it support.”

The official Syrian news agency SANA said Israeli jets fired two missiles from Lebanese airspace toward the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus early Wednesday.

It said the missiles struck the al-Sabboura area, west of Damascus, and did not cause any casualties. Citing an unnamed military source, SANA did not specify what the missiles struck. Damascus residents reported on social media hearing loud blasts around 2 a.m.

The Israeli military has declined to comment, but Israel is widely believed to have carried out a number of airstrikes in Syria in the past few years that have targeted advanced weapons systems, including Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles and Iranian-made missiles. The arms are believed to be destined for Lebanon's Hizbullah.

Wednesday's strike comes days after Israeli aircraft hit a machine gun-mounted vehicle inside Syria, killing four Islamic State-affiliated militants inside after they opened fire on a military patrol on the Israeli-controlled side of the Golan Heights. The violence appeared to be a rare case of an intentional shooting ambush by Islamic militants targeting Israeli troops.

Israel has been largely unaffected by the Syrian civil war raging next door, suffering only sporadic incidents of spillover fire over the frontier that Israel has generally dismissed as tactical errors of the Assad regime. Israel has responded to these cases lightly, with limited reprisals on Syrian positions in response to the errant fire.