JERUSALEM: Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said Monday that his country had struck “chemical weapons” in neighbouring Syria, where rebel forces ousted president Bashar Al Assad over the weekend.
Speaking at a press conference, Saar said “we attacked strategic weapon systems like, for example, remaining chemical weapons or long-range missiles and rockets in order that they will not fall in the hands of extremists”.
Saar earlier said that his country’s military takeover of the buffer zone along its border with Syria was a “limited and temporary step”.
“This is a limited and temporary step we took for security reasons,” Saar said in a press conference at the foreign ministry in Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Sunday that he had ordered the army to “take control” of the zone after the fall of Al Assad.
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 Al 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 organiSation by the US, Israel’s closest ally.
Netanyahu said on 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.
Saar 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 Al 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 US 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.
