Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Sunday to repel all cross-border attacks after the Israeli army shot dead two suspected gunmen who tried to enter the country from Syria on Friday.

"The IDF thwarted an attempt to infiltrate the border," Netanyahu said. "We will continue to respond to every attempt to attack us and, to the best of our ability and part of our policy of initiating action, we will foil these attacks before they occur. "

Neither the identities of the killed gunmen nor their reasons for crossing the border have been confirmed.

The Israeli army said that after the suspects had destroyed the border fence and crossed into Israeli territory, they clearly determined that the two were armed.

The shooting is the latest one of a series of events in recent months that have rocked Israel's increasingly tense frontiers with Syria and Lebanon.

On March 18 four Israeli paratroopers were injured, one of them severely, by an explosive device that was detonated near the border fence in the northern Golan Heights area. Israel swiftly responded with air strikes and tank fire against Syrian military targets, including a training facility and artillery batteries, which it said aided the attack on its troops.