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When the air raid sirens started running in the region around Dimona on Thursday night, there was great concern.
Because in the barren desert region in the south of Israel there is not only one of only two Israeli nuclear reactors, it is also the home of the heart of the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
The nuclear research facility is a high-ranking strategic target for Israel's enemies and is far away from the civil war in Syria and the highly armed Hezbollah militia in neighboring Lebanon to the north.
A successful attack would be a major blow against Israel and evidence that its enemies have reached a new level of escalation.
According to the Israeli military, it was actually an attack from Syria, but the missile did not explode in the nuclear research center, but in the air 30 kilometers from Dimona and without causing any damage.
The incident is worrying, however, because the Israeli air defense apparently failed to intercept the missile even though a Patriot anti-aircraft battery had been activated.
The Israeli nuclear power plant in the Negev desert
Source: AFP
Two days earlier, the Iranian media had cheered an explosion in an Israeli missile factory and indicated that it could be sabotage.
And just last weekend a newspaper closely associated with the Iranian revolutionary leader Ali Khamenei called for attacks on Dimona in Iran in response to the Israeli sabotage at the Iranian uranium enrichment plant in Natanz.
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According to the Israeli military, the missile that flew 300 kilometers from Syria to the Dimona region was not a targeted attack on Israel's nuclear facility.
Rather, it was an SA-5 surface-to-air missile that shot down a Syrian air defense unit against an Israeli fighter aircraft.
Accordingly, the rocket missed its actual target and landed only by chance in the strategically sensitive region around Dimona.
Nevertheless, it was the most serious attack from Syria since the beginning of the civil war.
Israel responded that night with attacks on Syrian air defense positions - including the one from which the missile was shot down.
Israel's military has tried to downplay the incident so far.
In fact, for a moment, one of those nightmare scenarios that Israel has been trying to prevent for years materialized here.
Namely, that Israel's enemies are stationing modern weapons on its border that can target strategic goals deep inside Israel.
"If the rocket had hit the nuclear center, the Israelis would wake up today in a completely different reality", analyzes the "Jerusalem Post".
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Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the expansion of Iranian influence in the neighboring country, Israel has waged a steady struggle against being strategically encircled by Iran and its militias.
The ultimate goal: to prevent Iran from setting up military positions in the border area with Israel.
Deliveries of modern weapons, such as guided weapons, to the Lebanese Hezbollah are also to be prevented.
In the rarest of cases, Israel is committed to it when weapons caches or convoys destined for Hezbollah are attacked from the air or Iranian positions are bombed in Syria.
But at the end of 2017, the then head of the Israeli Air Force revealed that his country had already carried out almost 100 air strikes during the Syrian civil war to prevent damage to Israel.
Air defense positions of the Syrian regime are repeatedly targeted if they endanger Israel's air sovereignty.
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Over the years, Israel has expanded its radius of action more and more.
In 2019, for example, it attacked arsenals in Iraq belonging to militias allied with Iran, which were used to transport weapons to Syria and Lebanon.
Western intelligence services have also been warning for years that Iran is delivering its short-range missiles to militias allied with Tehran, which can reach both the Saudi capital Riyadh and Tel Aviv from Iraqi territory.
And in January Israel carried out massive air strikes against militias allied with Tehran and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in eastern Syria and in the Syrian-Iraqi border area.
For several weeks now, the Israelis have also strengthened the air defense positions in Dimona and Eilat on the Red Sea - in anticipation of attacks by militias allied with Iran using rockets or drones, including from Yemen. All of this was apparently not enough to intercept the Syrian anti-aircraft missile in the south of the country. Firing such a missile "is on the verge of Israeli air defense capabilities," as Israeli missile expert Uzi Rubin told Reuters. "The trajectory of a failed anti-aircraft missile to an unwanted target is very difficult to track," says Rubin.
This time Israel got away with the horror one more time. But the incident shows how vulnerable Israel can be to missile attacks. And why the Jewish state has been resisting the Iranian encirclement strategy so vehemently for years.