Israel Downs Syrian Fighter Jet Over Golan Heights

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/world/middleeast/israel-syria-fighter-plane.html

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JERUSALEM — Israel shot down a Syrian fighter jet on Tuesday after it penetrated Israeli-controlled airspace over the Golan Heights, the military said, a rare encounter that underscored the heightened risk of confrontation in the area.

As Syrian government forces advance to retake areas long held by rebels along the frontier with Israel, the military said it fired two Patriot surface-to-air missiles at the plane.

The downing of the jet, which crashed on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, was only the second time during the seven-year-old Syrian war that Israel had intercepted a warplane. The first was in 2014.

Israeli forces were on alert for any possible Syrian retaliation. Tensions in the area were already high as Syrian government forces advanced. But Syria, which has long been in a state of war with Israel, has so far avoided fighting on the Israeli front, focusing instead on its internal enemies and largely maintaining the truce with Israel that has held since 1974.

The Israeli military said the jet was either a Sukhoi 22 or Sukhoi 24. According to initial, unconfirmed reports from Syria, it was a Sukhoi 24 with a two-man crew. One pilot was said to have been killed; the fate of the other was unknown.

It was not immediately clear whether the warplane had intentionally penetrated Israeli-controlled airspace or had strayed from its path. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was “a gross violation of the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement with Syria.”

“We will not accept any such penetration of, or spillover into, our territory, neither on the ground nor in the air. Our forces acted appropriately,” he said.

The episode grabbed the attention of the United Nations Security Council, which coincidentally was holding a regular meeting on the Middle East.

“These hostilities demonstrate a disturbing trajectory of increasingly frequent and dangerous confrontations,” Nickolay Mladenov, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the council.

Danny Danon, Israel’s United Nations ambassador who also appeared before the council, echoed Mr. Netanyahu’s warning to Syria not to breach the truce that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Israel has controlled a large, strategically important portion of the Golan Heights since capturing it from Syria in the 1967 war and again pushing back Syrian forces in the 1973 war.

Under the 1974 agreement, both sides pledged to refrain from all military action against each other.

The Syrian state news agency, SANA, confirmed that Israel had shot down a Syrian jet but offered a different account, saying the plane was bombing rebels in southern Syria.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said Israel had been on elevated alert because of increasing tensions in the area. Israel facilitated the evacuation of hundreds of Syrian rescue workers over the weekend, and Colonel Conricus said there had been “an irregular amount of aerial activity on the Syrian side” during the day.

“We have issued numerous warnings through various channels in different languages,” he said, referring to advisories that Israel sent about its sovereignty and airspace before the Syrian plane was shot down. Israel has repeatedly urged Syria and all other parties in the area to respect the 1974 cease-fire.

Colonel Conricus said the jet had taken off from an air base near Palmyra in Syria, “flew at relatively high speed” toward Israel and had penetrated about 1.2 miles into Israeli airspace before two missiles took it down.

Yossi Kuperwasser, a retired Israeli general, told reporters that recent events had showed some of the potential repercussions and misunderstandings that can arise from internal Syrian fighting close to the frontier.

“What we are much more worried about is that some of the Syrian forces or some of the forces that are wearing Syrian military uniforms are actually not Syrians, but forces arranged by Iran that were sent to fight for the Syrians,” he said.

Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli military intelligence chief and ex-fighter pilot, said it would take a fighter jet only a few seconds to travel a mile and that Israel would have had to make a quick decision.

Israel said that an armed drone launched in February from the same Syrian air base had penetrated Israeli airspace before being shot down on what the Israels said was an Iranian mission to attack the country.

After intercepting the drone in February, Israel attacked what it said was the command-and-control center at the base. Syria then shot down an Israeli F-16 fighter jet in northern Israel, the first Israeli plane lost to enemy fire in decades. The pilots bailed out and survived.

That prompted a broad wave of Israeli strikes against Syrian and Iranian targets in Syria.

Israel shot down another drone this month that it said penetrated more than six miles over its territory. The military said that drone was unarmed and belonged to the Syrian armed forces.

On Monday, Israel publicly operated its new “David’s Sling” aerial defense system for the first time, launching two missiles to intercept two short-range ballistic missiles that Syria had launched as part of the internal fighting in its territory, and that Israel initially assessed might have been headed for Israeli territory.

David’s Sling is designed to intercept medium-range rockets and missiles as part of a multilayered air defense system that includes the Arrow system and Iron Dome. The interceptors appear to have missed their targets, and the Syrian missiles landed on the Syrian side.

Israel, in a move that may have created more friction with Syria, also helped move rescue workers belonging to the group known as the White Helmets and their families from an embattled pocket of southern Syria. It guided them through Israeli-held territory to neighboring Jordan en route to sanctuary in Western countries.

The White Helmets have been praised in the West for their work rescuing people caught in the rubble after Syrian government airstrikes. But the Syrian government accuses the rescuers of collaborating with terrorists and of staging footage of operations to demonize the government.

Despite the skirmishes, Colonel Conricus said Israel was sticking to its policy of noninterference in the Syrian war. But in a more covert war to protect its own interests, Israel has carried out scores of missile attacks against weapons stores and convoys said to be destined for Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon, and, more recently, against Iranian targets on Syrian soil.