Israel Threatened To Attack Assad Troops Along Syria-Israel Border
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said at a closed emergency session of the UN Security Council on Friday night that Israel threatened to attack President Bashar Assad’s troops near the border with Syria, during clashes Thursday between rebels and the Assad regime.
A senior IDF official confirmed Saturday that Israel did indeed pass that warning to the Syrians.
During the meeting with 15 members of the Security Council in New York, Ladsous said that the Israel Defence Forces and Syrian military were on the verge of the most direct military clash between the neighboring countries on the Golan Heights front in the past 40 years.
Blogger Nabil Abi Saab published a UN document on his blog UN Report, which contains most of what Ladsous said at the New York meeting. The document, titled “Note on developments in UNDOF,” said that after the rebels’ conquest of Quneitra, the Syrian military put five tanks and five armored personnel carriers in the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan.
This extraordinary Syrian step jolted the IDF troops in the area, and even reached the office of Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) informed the UNDOF Force Commander that should the movement of SAAF tanks continue, the IDF would take action,” the document states. “Subsequently, the UNDOF Force Commander conveyed the message to the Senior Syrian Arab Delegate (SSAD), UNDOF’s main interlocutor on the Bravo side.”
Read more at Haaretz.com.
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