Israeli air force jets bombed Syrian army positions near the town of Quneitra in the early hours of Wednesday, killing one soldier and wounding seven, as analysts warned of the danger of the country's armed forces being sucked further into its northern neighbour's conflict.

During the three years of the Syrian war, Israel has largely tried to avoid direct involvement, although it has periodically bombed targets it says are weapons shipments bound for the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, with whom Israel fought a short and brutal war in 2006.

The air raids, which targeted an army headquarters and two artillery batteries, came in response to the ambush of a group of paratroopers patrolling the Golan Heights, close to the border fence with Syria, near the town of Majdal Shams.

The soldiers were reportedly lured into an ambush and were hit by a buried bomb that was detonated as they approached.

Four paratroopers were injured in the blast. The Syrian military reported that one of its soldiers had been killed and seven injured in the air raids the following day.

A statement from the Syrian military hours after the strikes warned Israel against escalating the situation by repeating such "hostile acts" which it said "endanger the security and stability of the region".

The latest events follow a series of incidents on Israel's increasingly restive northern border. Although Israeli sources admitted that it was as yet unclear who had planted the bomb on the border, Israel's defence minister, Moshe Ya'alon, made clear that it held the Syrian military responsible for "enabling" the attack.

One possibility is that the bombing was planned as a retaliation by Hezbollah for an Israeli airstrike on 24 February in which four members of Hezbollah were killed in a strike on a weapons convoy for which the group threatened to "retaliate".

Ya'alon said in a statement on Wednesday morning: "We will not tolerate any violation of our sovereignty and any attack on our soldiers and civilians, and will respond with determination and force against anyone who acts against us, in any place and at any time, as we did last night.

"Whoever tries to harm us is fair game. We also hold the Assad regime responsible for actions originating in its territory, and if it continues to co-operate with terrorist elements that seek to harm the state of Israel, we will continue to exact a heavy price from it, in a manner that will cause it to regret its actions."

The air raids follow concern among Israeli officials about the growing instability on the country's northern border an area, which – until recently – had been largely calm. The bomb itself was the third incident on the border in two weeks.

The decision to target the Syrian military itself in response to the attack was widely interpreted as a warning to the regime of Bashar Assad to prevent any further incidents on the border. Previously artillery that had fallen in Israel from Syria had been treated as accidental.

Some Israeli military analysts linked the bombing on the border to what they described as the growing confidence of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, the Assad regime's closest military ally in the Syrian war, following a series of defeats for opposition forces in recent weeks.