“We [Israel] conduct occasional operations in Syria in order to prevent it from becoming a front against us … and to thwart the transfer of lethal weapons, particularly from Syria to Lebanon,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a public event in Acre on the afternoon of Dec. 1. It was the first time that any official Israeli source, and the prime minister no less, publicly admitted that Israel was militarily active in Syrian territory.

On Nov. 29, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon told Israeli public radio that a Russian fighter jet had recently penetrated Israeli airspace "accidentally." Ya’alon said, “The jet penetrated about a mile into our territory." He added, "We established radio contact with it and it immediately returned to Syrian airspace.”

In a “Sabbath Culture” event on Nov. 28, the director of the Ministry of Defense political-military bureau, Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amos Gilad, said that brief penetrations such as those by Russian pilots into Israeli airspace have happened a few times recently. The Russian pilots are immediately informed of this by radio and go back the way they came, without any incidents, he noted.

Things are heating up along the Russian-Turkish front, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan exchanging barbs and threats. At the same time, interesting things are happening on an equally sensitive and no less interesting front, in other words, where the Syrian and Lebanese airspaces meet Israel. As if there weren’t already enough players in the region to stir things up and complicate matters, they have recently been joined by the Russian army in full force, including massive air power, significant naval power and, most recently, S-400 anti-aircraft batteries. The range of the latter covers the entire region, meaning that any Israeli aircraft taking off there can be detected and shot down by Russian crews.