Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets Syrian soldiers in a military base in the town of Habit in the countryside of Idlib province in northwestern Syria on Oct. 22, 2019.(Photo: Xinhua)

Syrian air defenses shot down several Israeli missile strikes over the capital Damascus on Tuesday, state media reported.

"At 22:35 [2035 GMT] this evening the Israeli enemy carried out an aggression from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights on some targets in the Damascus area," Syrian state news agency SANA cited a military source as saying.

"Our air defenses intercepted the attack and shot down most of" the missiles, it said, adding that there were no casualties.

AFP reporters heard explosions above the capital, which official media said were the air defenses responding to the attack.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the air strikes had targeted two ammunition depots belonging to Iranian militias fighting on the side of the Damascus government just a few kilometers from the Damascus airport south of the capital.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Israel has routinely carried out raids in Syria, mostly targeting Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah forces as well as Syrian government troops.

Israel rarely confirms strikes in Syria, but the Jewish state's army has said that it hit about 50 targets in the war-torn country in 2020, without providing details.

In late February, Israeli air strikes targeted the area of Sayyida Zeinab south of Damascus, where Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Lebanese Hezbollah are present, the Observatory said, without reporting any casualties.

AFP