Israel Hints at New Strikes, Warning Syria Not to Hit Back
Atef Safadi/European Pressphoto Agency
For several hours on
Wednesday, Israel closed Mount Hermon, above, a popular tourist site in
Golan Heights, after mortar shells fired from Syria landed there.
WASHINGTON — In a clear warning to Syria to stop the transfer of
advanced weapons to Islamic militants in the region, a senior Israeli
official signaled on Wednesday that Israel was considering additional
military strikes to prevent that from happening and that the Syrian
president, Bashar al-Assad, would face crippling consequences if he
retaliated.
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“Israel is determined to continue to prevent the transfer of advanced
weapons to Hezbollah,” the Israeli official said. “The transfer of such
weapons to Hezbollah will destabilize and endanger the entire region.”
“If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to
strike Israel through his terrorist proxies,” the official said, “he
will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate.”
The Israeli official, who had been briefed by high-level officials on
Israel’s assessment of the situation in Syria, declined to be
identified, citing the need to protect internal Israeli government
deliberations. He contacted The New York Times on Wednesday.
The precise motives for Israel’s warning were uncertain: Israel could be
seeking to restrain Syria’s behavior to avoid taking further military
action, or alerting other countries to another military strike. That
would increase the tension in an already fraught situation in Syria,
where a civil war has been raging for more than two years.
There could be a secondary audience for the warning, analysts said, in
Hezbollah and its primary supporter, Iran. Hezbollah, which is based in
Lebanon, has said in recent days it could use weapons supplied by Iran
to retaliate for recent Israeli strikes on Syria.
Nearly two weeks ago, Israeli warplanes carried out two strikes in
Syria, the first hitting bases of Syria’s elite Republican Guard and
storehouses of long-range missiles, in addition to a military research
center that American officials have called the country’s main chemical
weapons site.
A more limited strike on May 3 at Damascus International Airport was
also meant to destroy weapons being sent from Iran to Hezbollah. The
Israeli government did not confirm either of the attacks, which followed
another earlier this year.
The Syrian government publicly condemned Israel for the assaults, saying
it “opened the door to all possibilities.” The Syrian deputy foreign
minister, Faisal Mekdad, declared, “We will respond immediately and
harshly to any additional attack by Israel.”
Mr. Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, have each said
in recent days that the Israeli-Syrian border, which has been relatively
quiet despite the more than two years of civil war inside Syria, could
become a “resistance front,” in response to Israeli attacks.
On Wednesday, mortar shells, fired from across the Syrian border, landed
in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The shells landed on Mount
Hermon, a popular tourist site, and were the latest in a series of what
Israel has generally considered errant fire from internal Syrian
fighting.
Israel did not fire back, as it had on several previous occasions, but
it closed Mount Hermon to the public for several hours during a Jewish
holiday on which hiking in the Golan is popular.
In his comments, the Israeli official said that “Israel has so far
refrained from intervening in Syria’s civil war and will maintain this
policy as long as Assad refrains from attacking Israel directly or
indirectly.”
“Israel,” he said, “will continue its policy of interdicting attempts to
strengthen Hezbollah, but will not intercede in the Syrian civil war as
long as Assad desists from direct or indirect attacks against Israel.”
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel,
declined to discuss the meaning of the Israeli official’s statement.
“We’re not going to comment on the story,” he said.
American and Israeli political analysts agree that Israel has little
motive to intervene in Syria’s civil war, but that it is deeply
concerned about the transfer of advanced weapons, as well as the danger
that Mr. Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons could be used against
it.
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Correction: May 15, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Hassan Nasrallah.
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