A colossal explosion near the port of Tartus, Syria, which lit up the skies of the coastal city on Sunday evening, was registered as an earthquake by seismic monitoring stations around the region according to several accounts.

Israel has been heavily bombing military targets in Syria linked to the former regime of president Bashar Al Assad, ousted in a shock offensive last week by the Hayat Tahir Al Sham rebel group. The Israeli air force is said to have launched more than 350 air strikes hitting ballistic missile launchers, missile carrying ships and what is left of Mr Al Assad’s dilapidated air force, as well as ammunition and suspected chemical weapons sites.

Israeli strike on Tartous, next level explosion. pic.twitter.com/kF7Oi4mTq2

— Danny Makki (@danny_makki) December 15, 2024

Israel claims it is targeting “strategic weapons” that they do not want to fall into the wrong hands. According to the Geographic Survey of Israel, there was a 3.1 magnitude earthquake registered off the coast about 10km north-west of Tartus – possibly related to the detonation of what appears to be a substantial amount of ammunition.

Several accounts online showed a large fire towering above the horizon, located inland from the port, at a site featuring distinctive ammunition silos dug into a hillside, visible on Google Earth. A cluster of other tremors were registered by Israel’s Geological Survey through the evening, possibly secondary explosions as different parts of the ammunition site exploded, seen in another video of the incident.

The huge volume of ammunition present is another illustration of how the demoralised and underfunded Syrian army was unable to harness remaining military power to defeat the rebels.

The incident is not the first time very large ammunition storage sites have been blown up in Syria, with a suspected Israeli strike in 2018 hitting military sites in Hama and Aleppo, at the time a 2.6 magnitude earthquake was detected.

***UPDATE***

Massive explosion in Tartus likely the ammunition storage facility near village of Bmalkah, about 10km (6 miles) inland. Likely not the Naval Base. #OSINT pic.twitter.com/61kjC4SawK

— H I Sutton (@CovertShores) December 16, 2024

In the Hama strike, Syrian opposition groups said the target was a cache of surface to surface missiles. The Assad regime once had one of the largest missile forces in the Middle East, including powerful long range Scud missiles and SS-N-26 cruise missiles that can be fired from land, with a 300km range.

Many of the weapons were expended in bombardments of cities held by rebels in the country’s 2011-2024 civil war, and some of the smaller missiles in the arsenal are thought to have been transferred to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.