JERUSALEM, 11 December 2006 — Israel believes Syria is preparing for war by stepping up missile production and deploying anti-tank rockets along the border, a senior intelligence official was quoted as saying yesterday.
An Israeli official quoted the head of the military intelligence research division, Gen. Yossi Beidetz, as telling the weekly Cabinet meeting that Syrian President Bashar Assad was “preparing his forces for a military conflict” with Israel.
“Syria has accelerated the production of long-range missiles and has deployed anti-tank rockets on its border with Israel,” which runs along the occupied Golan Heights, Beidetz said.
A military source said he believed Syria wants to incorporate lessons learned from the July-August war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, which put up stiff resistance to the Jewish state.
“Syria has learned a lot from Hezbollah which managed to inflict a lot of damage to Israeli forces, especially its tanks and armored vehicles, by using guerrilla warfare,” he said.
The warning came days after a report by a high-level US panel recommended Israel relaunch peace talks with Syria, which have been frozen since 2000. The US report, which focused on America’s Iraq strategy, said Israel should return the Golan Heights, seized from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, as part of a peace deal with Damascus that would halt Syrian support for radical Palestinian and Lebanese militants and end Syrian meddling in Lebanon.
“With respect to Syria, we’ve reached an impasse. Now is the right time to set a process in motion,” an unnamed Israeli official told the Maariv newspaper. “The current situation with Syria is not good. It is important to do something different and there are conditions to do so. We’ve exhausted sitting on the fence. Something needs to be done,” he said.
“At the moment, the Syrians are deliberating over which direction to turn. With our current mode of activity we are pushing them into Iran’s arms. On our side the Syrians meet a wall, and that is why they get repelled to the other side.”
