The good relations that Israel and Russia apparently maintainThey have friction points. The Russian Army on Friday accused the Israeli Air Force of putting a civilian aircraft at risk in one of its attacks in Syria. Moscow says Israel used the plane, which covered the Tehran-Damascus route with 172 people on board, as a shield against Syrian anti-aircraft systems during one of its operations in the early hours of Thursday. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the plane, an Airbus-320, had to land at the Russian air base in Jmeimim, in the coastal province of Lataquia, after the controllers took it out of the Syrian anti-aircraft attack zone. The alleged incident occurs just less than a month after the demolition of a Ukrainian passenger plane over Tehran by Iranian forces, who alleged that they confused the civilian ship, with 176 people on board, with a "hostile''. According to the story released by Moscow , four F-16 fighter jets of the Israeli forces launched an attack on Syrian positions outside Damascus, without entering Syrian airspace. To repel the impact of the eight air-to-ground missiles launched, the forces of Bachar El Asad employed air defense systems. At that same moment of the Israeli attack on the outskirts of Damascus, an Airbus-320 was flying towards the international airport of the Syrian capital. It has not been revealed from which airline, although according to data from the FlightRadar24 air traffic monitoring website, it may belong to the Syrian airline Cham Wings Flight 514. "That the General Staff of Israel conduct military military operations using civil aircraft with passengers as a shield to protect themselves from reprisals by Syrian air forces has become a common practice," said a spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, quoted by the Interfax agency. "Those Israeli strategic operations, unfortunately, despise the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians," added the spokesman, who has accused Jerusalem of knowing perfectly well that the civil aircraft with 172 people on board was circulating in the area. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an NGO that has informants on the ground, said Thursday that 23 Syrian pro-Iranian and military fighters had died in a missile attack launched at dawn near Damascus, in one of the deadliest actions attributed to Israel in the neighboring Arab country. The ambiguity and secrecy in the war that Israel is waging in Syria with Iran has sometimes become declared war. Israeli aviation commanders have discretion over the hundreds of operations they have carried out against convoys transporting weapons and missile arsenals from Hezbollah, the Shiite guerrillas with which they fought an open war in 2006 in southern Lebanon, and against the force Al Quds, expeditionary body of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly acknowledged, however, some interventions. Two Israeli aviation operations in Syria and Lebanon last summer triggered tension in the war between Israel and Iran. Contrary to the usual, the Hebrew Army reported that it had launched an attack against the base of Aqraba, in the southeast of the Syrian capital, to disrupt a pro-Iranian operation with drones loaded with explosives to attack targets in Israel's territory. A few hours later, Hezbollah revealed that Israeli drones had exploded in a Hezbollah fief. Netanyahu then warned that Iran and its associates were not going to enjoy immunity anywhere. Syria's anti-aircraft defenses, reinforced with new Russian-made defensive systems, demolished in 2018 an Israeli F-16 participating in a mission in Syrian territory. The two pilots were able to leave the device and were rescued, in the most serious incident in which the Hebrew State has been implicated in the nearly nine years of war in Syria. In March 2017, the Damascus Army fired SA5 ground-to-air missiles against Israeli Air Force fighters that were attacking Hezbollah targets. Israel then had to activate the Arrow-3 missile shield against enemy projectiles. One of the rockets launched from Syria was intercepted and destroyed north of Jerusalem by the radars and batteries of the Israeli-American joint manufacturing system. https://elpais.com/internacional/2020/02/07/actualidad/1581058060_418466.html