JERUSALEM // The Israeli military shot down a Syrian fighter jet over the Golan Heights on Tuesday.
It was the first downing of a Syrian jet by Israel since since 1985 and drew a sharp response from Damascus.
The Israeli military said a “Syrian aircraft infiltrated into Israeli air space” in the morning and that the military “intercepted the aircraft in mid-flight, using the Patriot air defence system”.
The downed aircraft was a Russian-made Sukhoi Su-24 fighter plane that had crossed 400 metres into Israeli air space before being shot down, an Israeli military official said.
Pictures showed smoke rising from the Syrian village of Jubata Al Khashab which had been bombed by the Syrian warplane moments before it was shot down by a Patriot surface-to-air missile fired by Israel.
Defence minister Moshe Yaalon said the jet had “approached Israel’s sovereign territory on the Golan in a threatening manner”.
The downing came just three weeks after Israel shot down a drone over the Golan as heavy fighting raged on the Syrian-controlled side of the plateau, most of which has been seized by rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar Al Assad.
The Assad regime has been hitting back with frequent air strikes in a bid to retake control. Some have been close to Israeli positions.
Damascus said the downing of its fighter jet showed Israel’s support for the rebels on the Golan, which include Al Qaeda loyalists who held 45 UN peacekeepers hostage for two weeks before releasing them earlier this month.
It described it as a “flagrant violation” of a UN Security Council resolution passed earlier this year calling for international action against militant groups.
But Mr Yaalon warned that Israel would not tolerate any threats to its security and would respond “forcefully”.
“We will not allow anyone, whether it is a state actor or a terror organisation, to threaten our security and breach our sovereignty,” he said.
“We will respond forcefully against any such attempt, whether it is an error or intentional.”
Since the uprising against Mr Al Assad’s rule erupted more than three years ago, there has been a growing number of rockets and mortar rounds hitting the Israeli side of the ceasefire line.
Most of them have been stray, but there have been several incidents of intentional fire – one of which killed an Israeli teenager in June. Israel has occasionally retaliated.
Some 510 square kilometres of the Golan remain under Syrian control, with UN peacekeepers overseeing a buffer zone along the ceasefire line.
Last week, the UN Disengagement Observer Force, which monitors the ceasefire, was forced to withdraw hundreds of its peacekeepers to the Israeli-occupied side after rebels advanced on their positions.
Syria’s UN ambassador accused the rebels of seizing UN weapons, uniforms and vehicles from the peacekeepers in order to set up a “safe zone” from which to wage attacks.
The UN Security Council held a special session on the deteriorating security situation on the Golan, at which members called on the rebels to withdraw from the buffer zone and return peacekeepers’ equipment.
The session was convened over concerns for the safety of the UN force after 45 Fijian peacekeepers were held captive for two weeks by Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra. They were eventually released unharmed earlier this month.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed the area in a move that has never been internationally recognised.
* Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
