The bombing by the Israeli air force on Wednesday of an arms depot on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus was not a surprise.
Last weekend, Israel's newly re-elected Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is reported to have sent envoys to Washington and Moscow to reassure the United States and Russia that the impending attack was not an intervention in Syria's two-year civil war.
It was, said the envoys, part of the Jerusalem government's continuing semi-clandestine war to stem the flow of increasingly sophisticated weapons to the anti-Israeli terrorist group Hezbollah, which is in control of much of Israel's northern neighbour Lebanon.
This would not have come as a surprise to Moscow or Washington. For months, Israel has been warning that it would act if there was any indication that the besieged Damascus regime of President Bashar Assad attempted to send its stocks of chemical weapons or other sophisticated armaments to Hezbollah.
The message that something serious was imminent was even more evident in recent days as tens of thousands of gas masks were distributed to people in northern Israel bordering Lebanon and a full-scale gas-attack exercise was held.
Israel also deployed its so-called Iron Dome anti-missile system in the north of the country as part of the exercise.
For many Israeli security officials, Hezbollah is the most immediate and serious threat to their country. Hezbollah's main source of weapons, Iran, may be trying to acquire the capacity to build nuclear weapons. And another Iranian proxy terrorist group, Hamas in Gaza, is an irritant with its regular attacks using short-range rockets smuggled in across Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
But Hezbollah is a more skilled and immediate danger.
In the 34-day war in southern Lebanon in 2006, Hezbollah claimed to have fought the Israeli army to a standstill and has received much adulation in the Middle East as a result.
Since then, Hezbollah has ignored United Nations resolution 1701 calling for an embargo on arms shipments to Lebanon.
There are reports that Hezbollah has even acquired Scud D surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 700 kilometres and capable of carrying a one-ton warhead.
Two of these missiles originating in North Korea and supplied with the help of Iran and Syria are reported to have been sent to Hezbollah in 2010 and another eight in 2011.
Until the outbreak of the long-running uprising in Syria nearly two years ago, Hezbollah let Syrian President Bashar Assad store many of the group's most sophisticated weapons. But since the start of the Syrian uprising Hezbollah has been moving its stockpiles of weapons to Lebanon.
The Israeli air force has absolute control over Lebanese air space and conducts constant intelligence-gathering flights. All Hezbollah weapons caches in Lebanon are thus vulnerable to Israeli discovery and attack.
Hezbollah apparently figures the risk of losing its weapons to Israeli attacks in Lebanon is less than the near-certainty of losing them all when the Assad regime collapses in Syria.
Among the weapons reported destroyed in Wednesday's attack on the Damascus weapons depot, which the Syrian government described as a "scientific research facility, were Hezbollah's stockpile of SA-17 anti-aircraft weapons. There were indications trucks were forming up a convoy at the depot to carry these to Lebanon.
These Russian-made mobile weapons are reputed to be among the most sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons on the market. They have a range of about 25 kilometres and emit a low radar signature, which makes them hard to detect.
If Hezbollah had take delivery of the missiles, it would have ended the impunity of Israeli reconnaissance flights over Lebanon.
Since the end of the 2006 war in southern Lebanon, Israel has been constantly on the alert for weapons destined for Hezbollah and swift to act when shipments have been detected.
In 2009, Israel carried out two attacks in Sudan, one on a truck convoy and one on a ship in Port Sudan, believed to be carrying weapons from Iran for Hamas and Hezbollah.
Also in 2009 three ships suspected of carrying Iranian arms destined for Hezbollah in defiance of the UN embargo were detained at sea.
One, the Russian registered container ship Monchegorsk, was seized by the U.S. navy and found to be carrying a large cargo of artillery shells and other ammunition. The ship was held in Cyprus where it later blew up, killing 12 people.
In October last year, the Israeli air force bombed a munitions factory in the Sudanese capital Khartoum which was allegedly making weapons for Hezbollah and Hamas.
In November 2011, a massive Hezbollah arms cache near Siddiqin close to Lebanon's southern port city of Tyre exploded. There is speculation it was attacked by an Israeli missile-equipped drone aircraft.
In October last year, there were a series of blasts at a Hezbollah weapons storage depot in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa valley.
And, in mid-December, a Hezbollah arms store blew up in the southern Lebanese town of Tairharfa close to the border with Israel.
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