ISRAEL attacked Syrian army positions overnight yesterday after stray fire from the Syrians damaged a border fence in the occupied Golan Heights.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said two Syrian targets were hit overnight after their fire damaged Israel’s security fence on the Golan, occupied since the 1967 six-day war.

Israel has previously used shelling by the Western-backed rebel groups that control most of the frontier as a pretext to attack Syrian military targets.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement has sent thousands of guerillas to help its ally Syria defeat the religious fundamentalist rebels.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, comprising Kurdish and other militia backed by US and French special forces, said that they had repelled an Islamic State (Isis) counteroffensive around Manbij, near the Turkish border.

The YPG has been fighting to capture the besieged town from Isis for weeks but over the weekend the extremists counterattacked on multiple fronts, capturing Mount Saraj and several villages to the south.

In the north-east, clashes continued yesterday between the Syrian army reserves and the Kurdish Asayish paramilitary police in the city of Hassakeh after breaking out on Sunday.

The two forces first came to blows in April when the Asayish and YPG tried to take over the town of Qamishli, on the Turkish border north of Hassakeh, where government and Kurdish forces had maintained a joint peace against Isis attacks.