Syria fires missiles at Israeli jets after airstrikes

Anti-aircraft missiles were launched from Syria into Israeli-controlled territory early on Friday, following a series of Israeli airstrikes inside Syria, the Israeli military said. The military said its warplanes struck several targets in Syria and were back in Israeli-controlled airspace when several anti-aircraft missiles were launched from Syria toward the Israeli jets.

Israeli aerial defense systems intercepted one of the missiles, the army said, but did not elaborate. It would not say whether any other missiles struck Israeli-held territory, but it said the safety of Israeli civilians and the safety of the Israeli aircraft "were not compromised."

The army said the incident set off sirens in Jewish settlement communities in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank. The firing of missiles from Syria toward Israeli aircraft is extremely rare, though Israeli military officials said there was a shoulder-fired missile a few months ago.

There was no immediate comment from the government in Damascus, nor its ally Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group that is believed to possess such missiles. Israeli Channel 10 TV reported that Israel deployed its Arrow defense system for the first time against a real threat and hit an incoming missile intercepting it before it exploded in Israel.

It also showed footage from Jordan of what was described as remnants of the missile. It said the Israeli military had been on a mission to destroy a weapons convoy destined for the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

It was not immediately clear how debris from the missile may have ended up in neighboring Jordan.

Other Israeli media also reported that the Arrow was deployed. The Haaretz daily said the interception took place north of Jerusalem. However, the Arrow is designed to intercept missiles in the stratosphere so it remained unclear why the system would have been used in this particular incident.

The military had no immediate comment on the reports.

The Arrow is mainly designed for ballistic missiles. It is part of what Israel calls its "multilayer missile defense" comprised of different systems meant to protect against short and long range threats, including the thousands of missiles possessed by Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon and rockets used by Hamas and other Islamic militant groups in Gaza. Israel has been largely unaffected by the Syrian civil war raging next door, suffering mostly sporadic incidents of spillover fire over the frontier that Israel has generally dismissed as tactical errors by Syrian President Bashar Assad's government forces. Israel has responded to these cases lightly, with limited reprisals on Syrian positions in response to the errant fire.

The Jordan Valley part of the West Bank borders Jordan. Israel captured it along with the rest of the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war. Palestinians demand the areas for a future state. Israel is widely believed to have carried out a number of airstrikes on advanced weapons systems in Syria including Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles and Iranian-made missiles, as well as Hezbollah positions but it rarely confirms them.