JERUSALEM, 18 September 2007 — The veil of secrecy Israel has thrown around an alleged air raid on Syria earlier this month was drawn even tighter on Sunday when the chief of military intelligence was ordered to keep mum on the issue in his appearance before a powerful parliamentary panel.
With Israel’s usually talkative government maintaining an uncharacteristic silence, information on the mysterious incident has come almost exclusively from abroad.
Discussing the incident on an Israeli TV station Sunday, an outspoken former US ambassador to the UN said he thought Israel might have been attacking a nuclear installation, “a message not only to Syria, but to Iran.”
Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of Parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, told reporters he instructed military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin to avoid any mention of Syria at a committee meeting on Sunday. Panel members regularly report to journalists during and after committee meetings.
In a statement some participants took to be an oblique reference to the success of the alleged Syria raid, Yadlin told the meeting, “Israel’s deterrence has been rehabilitated since the Lebanon war, and it affects the entire regional system, including Iran and Syria,” according to a lawmaker who was present.
Foreign news reports have suggested that Israel struck a Syrian site designed to make non-conventional weapons, possibly a nuclear installation built with North Korean help.
“I think it would be unusual for Israel to conduct a military operation inside Syria other than for a very high value target, and certainly a Syrian effort in the nuclear weapons area would qualify,” the former UN ambassador, John Bolton, told Israeli Channel 10 TV in an interview broadcast Sunday.
