Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was formally in a state of war with Assad, the emergence of a new Islamist power base in its immediate vicinity adds an additional threat after more than a year fighting Iran-backed militant groups. (Shaul Golan, Pool Photo, AFP via Getty Images/TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — Israel said it carried out strikes against chemical weapons and missile-storage sites in Syria, describing the move as a preventive measure to ensure the safety of citizens after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.
Opposition groups led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, which captured Damascus over the weekend, are people with “an extreme ideology of radical Islam,” Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said in a briefing on Monday. The Israel Defense Forces targeted weapons systems, including chemical, so “they will not fall in the hands of extremists,” he said.
The toppling of Syria’s longtime ruler Assad, after a dramatic territorial advance by rebel forces, has sent shockwaves through the Middle East and made neighboring Israel particularly wary. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was formally in a state of war with Assad, the emergence of a new Islamist power base in its immediate vicinity adds an additional threat after more than a year fighting Iran-backed militant groups.
HTS is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., Israel’s closest ally.
Netanyahu said Sunday he ordered the Israeli military to take control of a buffer zone east of the border with Syria, an area the army says is about 155 square miles in size. Science Minister Gila Gamliel, a member of Netanyahu’s security cabinet, told Tel Aviv radio station 103 FM that all of the zone “and beyond” was now under Israeli control. Sa’ar disputed this, saying troops are positioned less than two miles from the border.
In 2013, Syria agreed with ally Russia to export and destroy its chemical-weapons arsenal. However, Israel believes that Assad held back some of the arms, which the departed President had used to crush protests that erupted during the Arab Spring in 2011.
Golan, the area straddling Israel and Syria, was mostly captured by Israel in the 1967 Six- Day War and later annexed. Israeli sovereignty there has been recognized by the U.S. but not by other world powers.
Separately, the IDF said an unmanned aerial vehicle that likely originated in Yemen struck a residential building in the area of Yavne, near the southern Israeli port of Ashdod. The Yemen-based Houthis, one of Iran’s allied militia groups, have been firing drones and other weapons at Israel since not long after the war against Hamas began in October 2023.
Both the Houthis and Hamas are considered terrorist organizations by the U.S.
With assistance from Alisa Odenheimer.
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