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Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Defense Minister Yaalon denies Israel attacked Syria’s Latakia arms depot. Twenty-five Syrian shells on Golan

DEBKAfile Special Report July 16, 2013, 5:58 PM (IDT)

Tags: Moshe Yaalon, Latakia, Syria, Golan, US-Israel,

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ya'alon on the Golan

Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon Tuesday, July 16, contradicted US claims that Israeli air strikes of July 5 were responsible for destroying Russian-made Yakhont SS-N-26 anti-ship missiles stored at the Syrian port town of Latakia.. Wiped out too were the system’s radar. The claims by Pentagon and other US officials were widely published by American and British media and Syrian rebel outlets. Yaalon spoke while visiting a defense plant near Acre.

Israel has consistently abstained from commenting on reports of this kind, ever since, six years ago, US administration officials named Israel as having demolished the North Korean-built plutonium reactor in northern Syria.

Neither does Jerusalem normally deny such reports – at all events, not until Tuesday, when the minister delivered Israel’s first comment on the Latakia episode. This deliberate denial is all the more striking given the wide media mileage of the American version, which looked like a move to draw Israel into involvement in the Syrian conflict.

Sunday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in an interview to CBS TV declined to answer questions on the Latakia incident, only asserting that Israel stands by its policy of preventing advanced weapons reaching Syria from falling in to the hands of the Lebanese Hizballah.

So, clearly, in the last two days, official Israeli tactics appear to have shifted from non-response to denial. The defense minister also reiterated a point he has made before, that Israel is not involved in the Syrian civil war but reserved the right to hit back for any cross-border Syrian fire against its territory.

All the same, at around the same time as he spoke, 25 shells landed in the center of Israeli Golan as new fighting erupted between the Syrian army and rebel fighters around the town of Quneitra. Yet there was no sign he had ordered the IDF to respond.

Unlike in previous instances, when flying ordnance on Golan elicited IDF tank or missile fire, the army spokesman in Tel Aviv commented with unusual forbearance that they were almost certainly stray shells and not aimed at Israel.

This signaled another apparent shift in Israeli policy: Not only has a top official stepped forward to contradict a report by US officials, but the IDF is holding its hand against a volley of Syrian shells falling inside the Golan.

Interestingly, the only other denial of Israeli responsibility for the Latakia attack came from Damascus, where government officials attributed the explosions to al Qaeda. This sort of concurrence between Jerusalem and Damascus is so surprising that, who knows? the Syrians may have got it right after all.

Labels: Armaments, Conflict, Defence, Israel, Revolution, Russia, Syria