https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

The Israelis used four F-16 fighter-bombers to stage the surprise night attack targeting sites near Latakia, close to the airbase being used by the Russians. They came in from the Mediterranean Sea using the Russian plane to mask their approach as the Ilyushin 20 would have presented a much larger radar profile for the air defenses.

The Israelis might have been expecting that the Syrians would not fire at all at the incoming planes knowing that one of them at least was being flown by their Russian allies. If that was the expectation, it proved wrong and it was indeed a Syrian S-200 ground to air missile directed by its guidance system to the larger target that brought down the plane and killed its fourteen crew members.

That is fucking wild, so in the previous 2019 case the Syrian AD actualy called the bluff and engaged them but predictably it resulted in friendly fire destroying the Russian aircraft and killing 14.

Then 3 years later they do it again using yet again Russian civilian passanger aircraft this time and obviously now the Syrians don't engage.

I have to say the Ukraine war made me a bit more resiliant to rage bait but holy fucking shit, I'd say stuff but I wont.

Baiting shootdowns of airliners is a classic CIA tactic that reached its zenith with KAL007.