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• A daily summary of global reports on security issues.

Israel and Syria traded fire across their border today in the third such incident in a week. Although Israel has not taken sides in Syria's civil war, it has been explicit that it is willing to take drastic measures to ensure that, amid Syria's chaos, advanced weapons do not drift unnoticed into the hands of the anti-Israel militant group and Damascus-ally Hezbollah.

Earlier this week,ÌýPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel wasÌý"preparing for every scenario" and that "we will act to ensure the security interest of Israel's citizens in the future as well," Reuters reports. The Israeli military confirmed today that their soldiers "returned precise fire" after Syria fired on Israeli troops in the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war. Israel annexed the land in 1981, while Syria continues to claim it, leaving the border a cease-fire line. (Editor's Note: This article was amended to clarify the status of the Golan Heights dispute.)Ìý

The Times of Israel reports that the Syrian ArmyÌýstated that its troops "destroyed" an Israeli military vehicle, along with those in it, but that the Israel Defense Forces spokesman's office reported that a vehicle was "hit by light weapons fire, causing slight damage to the vehicle." It was the first time that the Syrian Army acknowledged firing across the border into Israel since the outbreak of civil war.

The Times of Israel posits that the acknowledgement was "an attempt by President Bashar [al-Assad]'s regime to project toughness following three Israeli airstrikes near Damascus" in the last month to which it did not retaliate.

Until civil war erupted in Syria, the border had been relatively quiet since 1973, the last time Israel and Syria fought a war. Even now, Israel's involvement has little to do with the Syrian government itself, but with the possibility of an uptick in the number of weapons bound for Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group that is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a client of Iran, and one of the greatest threats to Israel.

Michael Herzog, a former Israeli defense ministry chief of staff and current fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote following an Israeli airstrike near Damascus earlier this month that Israel's "actions were driven not by ambitions to shape Syria's future, but by concerns about the strategic balance between itself and the Hezbollah-Iran axis."

Herzog notes that Hezbollah is not Israel's chief foe – that would be Hezbollah's chief sponsor, Iran. But Hezbollah, with whom Israel fought a war in 2006, runs a solid second, and Israelis "see a high chance of another round with Hezbollah in the future."

Hezbollah is deeply involved in the fight in Syria, as º£½Ç´óÉñ's Nicholas Blanford illustrated yesterday in a dispatch from Lebanon's border region, where residents were holding funerals for Hezbollah fighters killed in battle in Syria.

With the number of fighters killed or wounded in Syria becoming too large to keep quiet, Hezbollah has finally come out into the open about its presence in Syria. It is currently fighting alongside the Syrian Army in a high-profile offensive to retake the Syrian rebel-held town of Qusayr, a few miles north of the Lebanese border.

That narrative seems to have been absorbed. "No, we are fighting Israelis in Syria," one Hezbollah fighter told Mr. Blanford. "Only they are wearing a dishdash and carrying the Quran. But it is the same Western and Israeli project that wants to weaken the resistance."