Russia has said on Wednesday that Israel should stop carrying out what it called arbitrary air strikes on Syria two days after the Israeli air force targeted Iranian forces there.
Israel, which has vowed to drive Iranian forces out of Syria, has repeatedly attacked associated with Tehran’s forces or its Shiite militias, including Lebanon's Hezbollah.
"The practice of arbitrary strikes on the territory of a sovereign state, in this case, we are talking about Syria, should be ruled out," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, in answer to a question from Russian news agency TASS about recent Israeli air strikes on Syria.
She said such strikes added to tensions in the region, something she said was not in the long-term interests of any country there, including Israel.
"We should never allow Syria, which has suffered years of armed conflict, to be turned into an arena where geopolitical scores are settled," TASS cited her as saying.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a tweet on his Persian Twitter account taunted the commander of Iran’s Qods force, General Qassem Soleimani, saying that instead of intervening in Iran’s elections he should look into the situation of bases he wants to establish in Syria.
Netanyahu added that “As long as I am prime minister, I will not stop the campaign against them [Iran’s bases]”.
