Asked in an interview if the Assad regime acquisition of the S-300 would clip the Israeli military’s wings, Tzachi Hanegbi, the Israeli regional cooperation minister and a non-voting member of its security cabinet, said: “Unequivocally, no.”
“The operational abilities of the air force are such that those (S-300) batteries really do not constrain the air force’s abilities to act,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.
Referring to F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that Israel began receiving from the United States over a year ago, Hanegbi said: “You know that we have stealth fighters, the best planes in the world. These batteries are not even able to detect them.”
Hanegbi said that Russia had previously stationed its own S-300 in Syria, so the system’s capabilities had long been factored into Israeli planning. Syria’s military would require “a few months” to get its S-300 operational, he said.
“We have clarified to the Assad regime more than once that we will not step back from our commitment to prevent Iran’s entrenchment in Syria,” Hanegbi said, adding a veiled threat to take action against the S-300 on the ground: “We were already forced, a few months ago, to destroy Assad regime’s missile batteries, and I hope they won’t challenge us in the future.”
Any such hiatus was a “tactical situation over a week or two” rather than a strategic reassessment by Israel, Hanegbi said.
Asked if Iran and its allies had used the period to step up their activities in Syria, he said he had seen “no basis for that” in Israeli intelligence assessments.
Reuters reported in 2015 that Israel had trained against a Russian-supplied S-300 system in Greece.
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