© AP/SANAFrame grab Dec. 25, 2018 shows Israeli warplanes flying over Lebanon fired missiles toward areas near Damascus hitting an arms depot.
As has become the normal practice,
Christmas Day's air raid by Israel directed against targets near Damascus was largely ignored by the US media. Given the fact that
Israel has bombed Syria more than two hundred times, the attack itself, which wounded three soldiers at a warehouse, was not particularly notable. But what was significant was the fact that
it was the second time that Israel has used other planes to mask the approach of its own warplanes to the target. On this occasion, the masks consisted of
two civilian airliners making their approaches to the airports in Beirut and Damascus. Fortunately, the Syrian Arab Air Defense Forces made the decision to delay the deployment of surface-to-air missiles and electronic jamming "to prevent a tragedy" and air traffic control was able to divert one of the passenger jets landing at Damascus to the reserve military airport in Khmeimim in southern Latakia.
Syrian anti-aircraft crews did manage to intercept and shoot down fourteen of the sixteen incoming missiles that were launched by six Israeli F-16 warplanes using US-made GPS-guided GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs). If the Syrian air defenses had been more reckless and gone after the F-16s themselves,
they might have hit an airliner by mistake and hundreds of lives could have been lost.
Comment: See also: