JERUSALEM // Syria fired missiles at Israeli warplanes early on Friday after a series of Israeli air strikes inside Syria. Both sides confirmed the military exchange which, though rare, now threatens to escalate tensions in the region even further.
Damascus said Syrian anti-aircraft systems confronted the planes and shot one of them down over Israeli- controlled territory and hit another. But the Israeli military denied the claim, saying there was no sign that any of their jets had been damaged in any way.
The Israeli military said its aircraft struck several targets in Syria and were back in Israeli-controlled airspace when several anti-aircraft missiles were launched from Syria toward the Israeli jets.
Israeli aerial defence systems intercepted one of the missiles but the army would not say if any other missiles struck Israeli-held territory, but confirmed the safety of Israeli civilians and Israeli aircraft was “not compromised.”
The army said the incident set off sirens in Jewish settlement communities in the Jordan Valley, part of the West Bank.
The firing of missiles from Syria toward Israeli aircraft is extremely rare, though Israeli military officials reported a shoulder-fired missile a few months ago.
A Syrian military statement said four Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace — flying into Syria through Lebanese territory — and targeted a military position in central Syria.
The Syrian statement, in line with typical anti-Western rhetoric from Damascus, said the “blatant aggression” was an attempt by Israel to support “terrorist gangs” of the ISIL group inside Syria and “deflect from the victories” of the Syrian army in the country’s civil war, which this week entered its seventh year.
Israeli Channel 10 TV reported that Israel deployed its Arrow defence system for the first time against a real threat and hit an incoming missile, intercepting it before it exploded in Israel. The aircraft were deployed on a mission to destroy a weapons convoy destined for the Lebanese Hizbollah group, which is backed by Iran and fights alongside Syrian government forces.
There was no comment from Hizbollah.
Jordan, which borders both Israel and Syria, said parts of the missiles fell in its rural northern areas, including the Irbid district, leaving debris which caused only minimal damage.
A chunk of missile crashed into the courtyard of a home in the community of Inbeh in northern Jordan, about 40 kilometres from the Syrian border.
Umm Bilal al-Khatib, a local resident, initially thought the noise she heard was an exploding gas cylinder. When she went outside she found a small crater and a 3-meter-long cylinder. Her husband contacted Jordanian authorities, who removed the debris.
The Haaretz daily said the interception took place north of Jerusalem. However, Israel’s Arrow defence system is designed to intercept long-range ballistic missiles high in the stratosphere, so it remained unclear why the system would have been used in this particular incident.
Israel has been largely unaffected by the Syrian civil war raging next door, suffering only sporadic incidents of spillover fire that Israel has generally dismissed as tactical errors by the Syrian army. Any retaliation on Syrian positions by Israel for the errant fire has been limited.
However, Israel is widely believed to have carried out air strikes on advanced weapons systems in Syria — including Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles and Iranian-made missiles — as well as Hizbollah positions, but it rarely confirms such operations.
* Associated Press