Israel and Iran clash in Syria for the first time

Israeli and Iranian military forces have engaged for the first time Syria, in what The Sunday Times calls “a sudden escalation of hostilities after months of tension”.

Israel launched a large-scale attack on 12 targets, a third of them Iranian, after one of its jets was shot down by anti-aircraft missiles.

Both Israel and Syria have signalled they are not seeking wider conflict and yesterday evening, Reuters reported the frontier was calm. However, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struck a defiant tone and promised that Israeli forces would press ahead with Syria operations despite their loss of an advanced warplane to enemy fire for the first time in 36 years.

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Despite the rhetoric, the LA Times says the chain of events “threatened to escalate into active combat between Syrian government forces and Israel, which has remained an outsider in the 7-year-old Syrian civil war”.

Both the United States, Israel’s closest ally, and Russia, which supports Assad in the Syrian civil war, have expressed concern over the latest clashes.

The sudden escalation also threatened to intensify the wider crisis in Syria “and showed the extent to which the country has become a battleground between Israel and Iran, bitter foes in the region”, reports the New York Times.

Iran has openly backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and provided him with funding, military equipment and personnel during the seven-year civil war. Now Israel fears Tehran is setting up bases in Syria, from which it could strike at the heart of Israel.