Israel shoots down Syrian warplane over Golan Heights

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Israel said it shot down a Syrian warplane that crossed into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Tuesday, but Damascus said the jet was fired on as it took part in sorties against rebels within Syria.

The incident added new fuel to weeks of tensions over the Golan, a strategic plateau between the two old enemies and where Israel has been on high alert as Syrian government forces close in to regain rebel-held ground.

Israeli army said its air defenses intercepted the Sukhoi plane after it penetrated the Golan Heights, adding that two Patriot missiles were launched at the Syrian Sukhoi fighter jet which penetrated two km into Israeli-controlled airspace.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Syrian jet had been in "gross violation of the separation of forces between us and Syria." Israel "took appropriate action," he said.

A picture taken on July 24, 2018 from the Tal Saki hill in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights shows several explosions caused by aerial bombardment across the border in Syria, during air strikes backing a Syrian-government-led offensive in the southwestern province of Daraa. /VCG Photo

Syrian state media SANA said the plane was targeted by Israel and hit while conducting raids in Syrian-controlled airspace.

It said the warplane was struck while hitting the positions of rebels in the town of Saida on the outskirts of the Yarmouk basin area in the western countryside of Daraa near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

"The Israeli enemy confirms its support for the armed terrorist groups," the official news agency SANA quoted a military source as saying. Lebanon's pro-Damascus TV station al-Mayadeen said the plane fell 15 km inside Syrian territory and did not enter the airspace of the occupied Golan.

UN peacekeepers "observed burning debris falling from an aircraft" some 10 km inside Syrian territory southeast of the Golan buffer zone.

The warplane's pilot was killed, Reuters reported, citing a non-Syrian source close to the Syrian government.

Activists said that the warplane fell in the Yarmouk basin area.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the Yarmouk basin, where the ISIL holds 30,000 civilians as human shields, has been hit by 2,200 airstrikes since a week ago.

Nickolay Mladenov, a UN envoy for the Middle East, warned on Tuesday of "a disturbing trajectory of increasingly frequent and dangerous confrontations" between Israel and Syria.

"I call on all parties to abide by all the provisions of the 1974 agreement," he told the UN Security Council.

(A warplane carries out a bombing run above Syria near the Israeli-Syrian border as it is seen from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, July 24, 2018. /VCG Photo)

Source(s): Reuters ,Xinhua News Agency