Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant threatened Iran after the Israeli military shot down a drone on Sunday that it said had infiltrated from Syrian territory. Meanwhile, Haaretz revealed that Israel has intensified its attacks deep inside Syria over the past decade.
Gallant said that tension is high on all fronts, stressing that Israel will work to remove Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah from Syria, and that it will not allow them or their proxies to harm Israel, as he put it.
The remarks come after the Israeli army spokesman announced on Sunday the recall of helicopters and fighter jets following the detection of an unidentified drone that had infiltrated from Syrian territory into Israeli airspace.
The Israeli military added that the march was shot down in an open area without posing any danger.
Israel's broadcaster said the march, which entered from Syria, was suspected of being Iranian.
Israeli military officials believe Iran was behind the launch of a drone from Syria toward Israel last night, Haaretz reported.
Israeli raids and Iranian threats
The downing of the march over Israel comes in light of the succession of air strikes on Syrian territory in recent days, the latest of which was in the early hours of Sunday in the Homs region and its countryside in the center of the country.
The official Syrian news agency quoted a military source as saying that 5 military personnel were wounded on Sunday, in addition to material losses as a result of what the source described as an Israeli aggression with rockets on sites in the city of Homs and its countryside in central Syria.
Earlier, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced the death of one of its military advisers, a captain, Meqdad Mahqani, in an Israeli raid on the Damascus suburbs early last Friday.
The IRGC stressed that what it called "the crime of the criminal Zionist entity" will not go unanswered, and Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani vowed that the blood of Iranian military advisers in Syria will not be wasted, and that his country reserves its right to respond to Israel at the appropriate time and place.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel will pay a heavy price to regimes that support what he described as terrorism outside Israel's borders, stressing that the internal dispute in his country will not prevent his government from fighting Israel's enemies wherever they are.
In this regard, Haaretz revealed that Israel intensified its raids and attacks on Iranian Revolutionary Guard targets in Syria after an infiltration operation carried out by a person who came from Lebanon planted a device and detonated it south of Haifa on March 13.
The newspaper added that Israel has intensified its attacks deep inside Syria over the past decade, focusing in the early years on supply convoys that smuggle weapons and ammunition to Hezbollah, and during the last five years targeting weapons factories and ammunition stores belonging to Iran and local militias cooperating with it in Syria.
Israel would rather conduct the war against Iran on Syrian soil than confront Hizbullah, fearing a direct confrontation with the group in Lebanon that could turn into a war that the parties do not want, she said.