Israel criticised over Syria strike Russia, the Arab League and Hizbollah condemned an air strike close to the Syria-Lebanon border by Israel, whose residents prepared themselves on Wednesday for a possible military escalation in the north. The Israel Defence Forces on Thursday still would not confirm the attack earlier this week. Western officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Financial Times and other media outside Israel on Wednesday that the strike hit a convoy of SA-17 anti-aircraft batteries heading toward Lebanon from Syria. The Syrians have presented a different version of events, saying that Israeli warplanes hit a military research facility in Jamraya, near Damascus, killing two people and injuring five more. The foreign ministry of Russia, one of the Syrian regime's few allies, said of the attack on Thursday: "If this information is confirmed, then we are dealing with unprovoked attacks on targets on the territory of a sovereign country, which blatantly violates the UN Charter and is unacceptable, no matter the motives to justify it." The Arab League issued a statement deploring what it called "cruel aggression" and said that Israel "should be held liable for the results of its aggression" and Syria compensated for the damage. Hizbollah called the raid a "savage attack that carries out the Zionist entity's policy which aims at preventing any Arab and Muslim state from developing its technological and military capabilities." Israeli military analysts said that the incident carried the risk of a military escalation with Syria or Hizbollah, but added that this was not a foregone conclusion because Bashar al-Assad's regime was embroiled in fighting rebel groups and could not afford to open another military front. "Both Syria and Hizbollah are in a situation of extreme weakness, and it doesn't serve their interests to start such clashes now," said Shlomo Brom, a research fellow with the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. However, he added, they could make "covert, under-the-surface attempts to reciprocate." Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, director of the security studies programme at Tel Aviv university, also said that Syria was preoccupied by its civil war, making a full-blown military confrontation unlikely. An all-out war is the last thing it can handle now. Its army is busy fighting the rebels," Mr Ben-Yisrael told Israeli Radio on Thursday. More likely is that at most there will be some pinpoint response. In Israel's north, civilians and officials have moved to a higher state of alert. On Wednesday the IDF hooked up an alarm system in Kiryat Shmona, near the Lebanese border, at residents" request. Israeli postal officials said on Wednesday that they had seen a significant rise since the beginning of this week for gas mask kits. The strike on the Lebanese-Syrian border came after several days of rhetorical sabre-rattling by Israel's government, which is worried about the threat that Syrian weapons will fall into the hands of Lebanon-based Hizbollah or other armed groups. Last weekend the country moved a second Iron Dome anti-defence missile battery to northern Israel. Israeli officials have expressed concern about Syria's chemical and conventional weapons arsenals, particularly about anti-aircraft systems like the SA-17, shore-to-sea missiles, or long-range ballistic missiles reaching Hizbollah and changing the balance of power in the north. Israeli officials" public silence on the attack is in keeping with similar actions in the past where it undertook military actions under the radar in order to avoid an open confrontation that might lead to war. In 2007 the country attacked a nuclear facility in Syria, but has never publicly confirmed this. With additional reporting by Abigail Fielding-Smith in Beirut