AL-QUDS (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime said on Tuesday that its military jets came under Russian anti-aircraft fire over Syria in May but they missed their target, describing the confrontation as a “one-off incident”.
The disclosure by war minister Benny Gantz came amid tensions between the occupying regime and Russia over the former’s condemnation of the Ukraine war and the latter’s scrutiny of a Jewish emigration agency.
Having helped Damascus turn the tide of a more than decade-old foreign-backed war, Russian forces in Syria regularly turn a blind eye to Zionist air strikes against targets inside Syria.
But Israel’s Channel 13 TV reported that, on May 13, a Russian-operated S-300 air battery fired on the regime’s jets as they carried out a Syria sortie - without hitting any.
“It was a one-off incident,” Gantz told a conference hosted by Channel 13, when asked to confirm the report. The Russian launch happened when the aircraft “were no longer around”, he said.
The Russian embassy in the Israeli-occupied territories did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Syria and the Zionist regime are technically at war due to the latter’s 1967-to-present occupation of the Arab country’s Golan Heights.
The regime maintains a significant military presence in the territory, which it uses as one of its launchpads for attacks on Syrian soil.
The regime’s attacks on Syria started to grow significantly in scale and frequency after 2011, when Syria found itself in the grip of rampant foreign-backed militancy and terrorism.
Syria’s Foreign Ministry said the country reserves the right to respond by appropriate means recognized by international law and the Charter of the United Nations to repeated Israeli aggression.
In two identical letters to the UN secretary general and the president of the Security Council, the ministry confirmed the Zionist regime’s criminal acts of aggression using bursts of missiles from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan targeting some points in the vicinity of Damascus.
The ministry urged the UN and the Security Council to exercise their responsibilities under the United Nations Charter and condemn such aggression.
It said the Security Council’s refusal to take the necessary measures to prevent and condemn the occupying regime’s repeated attacks shows the world body’s inability to assume its responsibilities and its failure to achieve the minimum implementation of its duties in maintaining peace and security in the region and across the world.