Israel says it struck suspected Syria chemical weapon sites

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, said on Monday that the Israeli military had conducted overnight strikes on multiple locations spanning coastal and southern Syria.

“Since the initial hours after the announcement of the fall of the former regime, Israel began launching intensive air strikes, deliberately destroying weapons and ammunitions depots,” it said.

According to the UN’s chemical watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a chemical weapon is a chemical used to cause intentional death or harm through its toxic properties, external.

The use of chemical weapons is prohibited under international humanitarian law regardless of the presence of a valid military target, as the effects of such weapons are indiscriminate by nature.

It is not known where or how many chemical weapons Syria has, but former President Bashar al-Assad is believed to have kept stockpiles and that the declaration he had made was incomplete.

Syria signed the OPCW’s Chemical Weapons Certificate in 2013, a month after a chemical weapons attack on suburbs of the capital, Damascus, that involved the nerve agent sarin and left more than 1,400 people dead.

The horrific pictures of victims convulsing in agony shocked the world. Western powers said the attack could only have been carried out by the government, but Assad blamed the opposition.

Despite the OPCW and the UN destroying all 1,300 tonnes of chemicals that the Syrian government declared, chemical weapons attacks in the country still continued.

BBC analysis in 2018 confirmed that between 2014 and 2018, chemical weapons were used in the Syrian civil war at least 106 times.