An Israeli drone struck a vehicle in the southwestern Syrian village of Beit Jinn on Saturday, wounding at least one person, in the latest of a fast-escalating string of Israeli military operations inside Syria this month.

The strike hit a truck on a road near Beit Jinn's farmland, roughly 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Israeli border in the foothills of Mount Hermon, according to Middle East Eye, which cited Al Jazeera Arabic. Syria's state news agency SANA also reported a civilian was injured.

The Israel Defense Forces confirmed the operation, saying it had targeted a "terror operative" whose plans for an attack on Israeli troops were in their "final stages" of preparation and posed an "immediate threat" to Israeli forces, according to a Times of Israel liveblog. No further details on the target's identity or affiliation were released.

Damascus condemns, Israel says it warned first

Syria's foreign ministry denounced the strike as a "flagrant violation" of its sovereignty and a "blatant breach of international law," framing it as part of a pattern of repeated Israeli incursions on Syrian territory, according to reporting relayed on the Times of Israel liveblog and corroborated by Asharq Al-Awsat.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel had warned Syria's leadership at the highest level in advance of the strike.

Katz said a "direct warning would be issued to the Syrian regime" in an attempt to head off retaliation before the operation was authorized.

The strike follows a volatile week in southwestern Syria. Israeli forces seized Bat al-Warda, a strategic hilltop overlooking Beit Jinn, on August 18, the same day Israel struck Syria's Abu al-Duhur airbase further north. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes across Syria and pushed troops into the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights.

The Abu al-Duhur strike has drawn an unusual public rebuke from within the Trump administration. US envoy Tom Barrack told interviewer Mario Nawfal that one theory — which he stressed was speculative, not intelligence-based — is that Israel is trying to "bait" Turkey into a military response that could "play well" for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israel's October elections. Several US officials separately told Reuters they believed electoral politics were a factor behind some of the recent strikes, arguing Damascus had taken no hostile action against Israel to justify them. Katz has dismissed Barrack's theory as "full of inaccuracies."

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack the IDF says it disrupted, and Syrian authorities have not identified the person wounded. With Israeli troops holding new ground near Beit Jinn and Washington publicly airing doubts about Israel's motives, both the military and diplomatic fallout from Saturday's strike appeared far from settled.