Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israeli troops will remain in Syrian territory indefinitely, blurring the border with Israel's northern neighbor.

The violence in Tartous province marks the deadliest challenge yet to the Islamist-led authorities which swept Bashar al-Assad from power.

Israel seized the mountainous region from Syria in 1967, and most of the world considers it occupied Syrian territory.

Israeli fighter jets have launched hundreds of airstrikes, while soldiers have seized a buffer zone and captured military posts in territory formerly under Syrian control.

Assad’s fall to bomb all the Syrian military assets it wanted to keep out of the rebels’ hands – striking nearly 500 targets, destroying the navy, and taking out, it claims, 90% of Syria’s known surface-to-air missiles.

Syria’s leadership isn’t the only aspect of the country to be changing as a result of this month’s toppling of longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad. The blurring of its borders is also underway — from Israel to the southwest and Turkey to the north.

Lebanon said on Thursday it was looking forward to having the best neighbourly relations with Syria, in its first official message to the new administration in Damascus.

The Israeli military hit weapons depots and air defenses, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Israel has said it aims to keep military equipment away from extremists.

Jolani, urged Israel to stop airstrikes after a bomb so powerful it reportedly measured on the Richter scale was dropped on Syria

Israel said it had wiped out the vast majority of the Syrian military's assets, including huge chunks of its air-defense network.

Israel is celebrating the fall of Assad because it breaks the noose that Iran had been patiently tightening around Israel’s borders in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Tehran’s pincer is now broken and rendered useless. From the point of view of Israel’s wider conflict with the Islamic Republic, the collapse of Assad’s regime is a strategic victory.

The goal, said Avi Dichter, an Israeli minister, “is to establish facts on the ground” as Islamist rebels seek to cement their rule over the fractured country.