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Mortar fire from Syria struck an Israeli military outpost on the Golan Heights yesterday, wounding two Israeli soldiers and prompting the IDF to return fire. The Israeli army’s Northern Command assessed that the Syrian mortars were stray fire from intense fighting between Assad regime troops and opposition forces.

One soldier sustained light shrapnel wounds while another suffered from shock. Both were evacuated to hospital. Meanwhile, the IDF identified a Syrian army position responsible for the attack and destroyed it. Israel’s Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon warned last week that, “We destroy every source of fire that we identify shooting at our territory, deliberately or not.”

Yesterday’s incident was just the latest of several incidents in recent months in which mortar and gunfire from fighting in Syria has landed on Israeli territory. More often than not the Israeli military has determined errant Syrian fire to be unintentional. In July, an IDF border patrol came under fire while a month previously fighting between Syrian government and opposition forces reached the town of Quneitra, just dozens of metres from Israeli military positions.

Israel Radio news reports this morning that two Syrian men and one woman who were injured in fighting within Syria were admitted to a hospital in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya for treatment. One of the men was said to be in serious condition while the others were in moderate to serious condition. Several hundred wounded Syrians have been treated in Israeli hospitals during the course of the country’s civil war.

Meanwhile, although an international team of experts has this week begun to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, a report in yesterday’s Yediot Ahronot suggests that Western intelligence officials believe Assad is determined to maintain a portion of these weapons to protect his Alawite community.