Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said he told Russia's vice premier in talks on Tuesday that Israel must continue to hit hostile targets in Syria, despite Moscow's decision to equipthe Assad regime with advanced air defense missiles.
Netanyahu said at a press conference that he told Maxim Akimov in talks in Jerusalem that Israel would continue to fight Iranian attempts to entrench itself militarily in Syria and channel advanced weaponry to its Lebanese ally, the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
Despite the delivery of the S-300 air defense missile batteries to the Syrian military, Israel was committed as a matter of self-defense to continue its "legitimate activity in Syria against Iran and its proxies, which state their intention to destroy us", Netanyahu said.
It was his first publicized meeting with a senior Russian official since the accidental Syrian downing of a Russian plane after an Israeli air strike in Syria, an incident that raised tensions between Israel and Russia.
Fifteen Russians were killed in the September 17 incident that Moscow blamed on Israel, accusing its pilots of using the larger Russian plane as cover.
Israel has disputed the Russian claims, saying that the IDF jets were back in Israeli
airspace when the plane was downed.
airspace when the plane was downed.
In response, Moscow announced new measures to protect its military in Syria, including equipping Damascus with S-300 air defense systems.
Russia and Israel set up a hotline in 2015 to avoid accidental clashes in Syria, but the new measures have led to concern among Israelis that their strikes will now be limited there.
Netanyahu, who met Akimov on the sidelines of meetings of a bilateral economics committee, said he believed that the current dispute with Moscow would be resolved.
"I think that with common sense and goodwill we can come to a solution that will allow the continuation of the good coordination between the Russian and Israeli militaries," he said.
At the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu said he would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin soon to discuss coordination.
The leaders have spoken at least three times by phone since the September incident.
