Israel advances to protect its borders with Syria, and Trump calls Turkey a "key player in shaping the post-Assad political landscape."

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.

Ankara's growing military presence in Syria has led to a diplomatic clash between former allies Israel and Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has supported Hamas, even hinting at some sort of armed intervention.

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.

How did Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad get away with murdering hundreds of thousands and dumping them in mass graves? Easy: The world let him and bashed Israel instead.

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

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 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.

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.