Syria will “respond immediately” to any new Israeli attack against its territory, its deputy foreign minister told AFP on Thursday, after two reported Israeli strikes on military targets last week.

“The instruction has been made to respond immediately to any new Israeli attack without [additional] instruction from any higher leadership, and our retaliation will be strong and will be painful against Israel,” Faisal Muqdad said.

He spoke in an interview with AFP in the Syrian capital.

Senior Israeli sources said the strikes targeted weapons bound for the powerful Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, a close ally of Damascus.

Muqdad denied that.

“They absolutely did not achieve their objective and they lied when they said they are targeting Hezbollah,” he said.

There is “no way Syria will allow this to happen again,” he added.

Israel reportedly targeted military sites near the capital Damascus early on Friday morning and again early on Sunday morning, with at least 42 soldiers reported dead in the second strike.

The Jewish state has repeatedly warned it will intervene to prevent the transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, with which it fought the devastating 2006 Summer War.

The strikes last week were the third time Israel is thought to have hit sites inside Syria since the beginning of an uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011. That first was in January of this year.

The uprising, which began with peaceful protests, has devolved into a bloody conflict that has killed more than 70,000 people, according to the UN, and displaced millions of Syrians.

AFP - 05/09/2013

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said Israel would erect a new security fence along its armistice line with Syria in order to protect the Jewish state from “infiltrations and terror.”

Speaking at the beginning of the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu noted that a new, fortified barrier along Israel’s border with Egypt, replacing an older one, was nearly complete.

“We intend to stretch an identical fence, with some necessary changes due to the different conditions, along the Golan Heights,” he said in remarks relayed by his office, referring to the occupied Syrian plateau.

“We know that on the other side of our border with Syria today, the Syrian army has backed off, and global jihad operatives have taken its place,” he said.

“We must therefore protect this border from infiltrations and terror, as we have successfully been doing along the Sinai border.”

Netanyahu added that “the question of chemical weapons here concerns us. We are coordinating our intelligence and evaluations with the United States and others, to be prepared for any scenario and possible developments.”

A security official told AFP that the new fence in the Golan Heights would be along the outline of the old one. The official noted that Israel had already completed some 10 kilometers of the new Golan fence, and had “about 60 kilometers to go.”

The official said he believed the work would be completed during 2013.

Israel captured the Golan from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War and annexed it in 1981, in a move never recognized by the international community.

03/12/12

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is accusing the Syrian government of serious violations of the 1974 agreement that separated Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights and is calling on both countries to halt firing across the cease-fire line.

Ban urged Syria to stop deploying troops and military equipment in the disputed zone.

In a report to the U.N. Security Council circulated Monday, Ban said recent incidents across the cease-fire line have shown the potential to escalate Israeli-Syrian tensions, and jeopardize the agreement and the region’s stability.

The report recommends a six-month extension of the 1,036-strong U.N. peacekeeping force in the Golan Heights monitoring the 1974 agreement until June 30. Israel captured the Golan from Syria in 1967, and Syria wants the land returned in exchange for peace.

Israel has sent a number of warning messages to Syria and is ready to defend itself, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Friday, a day after three Syrian mortar shells landed in Israeli territory. Last week, three Syrian tanks entered the demilitarized zone on the Golan Heights.

“The other side has received no small number of messages recently,” Ya’alon wrote on his Twitter account, saying that Syria has reacted accordingly.

Saying he hopes someone on the Syrian side takes control of the situation, Ya’alon parsed no words in saying Israel is ready to take action if necessary.

“If we see that it is spilling in our direction, we know how to defend Israeli citizens and the sovereignty of our state,” Ya’alon added.

PHOTO: NIR ELLIAS/REUTERS

One of the shells landed in the Eloni Habashan moshav, but did not explode; defence officials believe shells were errant, not intended as an attack; no damage or injuries reported.

Syrian people take cover as a second bomb explodes while civilians were undertaking a rescue attempt in nearby a building that was hit by a previous bomb during an air raid by government forces, on November 4, 2012, on the northern Syrian city of Al-Bab. AFP PHOTO/PHILIPPE DESMAZES

Israel says three Syrian tanks have entered the demilitarised zone in the Golan Heights for the first time in 40 years, raising concerns that the conflict in Syria could spillover its border.

The development comes as dramatic video emerged from Syria which purports to show rebels filming as a fighter jet targeted them.

In a relatively low-key response, Israel complained to UN peacekeepers present in the area, suggesting it did not see an immediate threat.

But the entry marks the most serious spillover of Syria’s turmoil to date at the frontier, where stray ordnance has exploded on the Israeli side in the past.

Meanwhile, the rebels said they had launched a major assault on the Taftanaz airbase in the northern province of Idlib which is used to deploy regime air power.

Video posted on the internet is said to show rebel fighters firing rockets at the airbase, and being fired on as they try to secure a strategic north-south corridor.

The attack on the Taftanaz base, from where helicopter gunships raid opposition positions and rebel-held areas, comes after troops launched an unprecedented wave of air strikes this week in a bid to reverse rebel gains.

The video said eight battalions were taking part in the attack, including the radical Islamist Al-Nusra Front.

It showed a missile launcher mounted on the back of a pick-up truck firing on regime positions.

The Syrian Revolution General Commission, a network of activists on the ground, said an operation had begun “to liberate the Taftanaz airbase”.

Analysts said rebel forces clearly have the momentum in the battle for Syria’s northwest.

“The rebels’ gains in the north seem irreversible,” said Thomas Pierret, a Syria expert at the University of Edinburgh’s Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies department.

He said regime forces appeared to be concentrating their efforts in the region on defending embattled commercial hub Aleppo, which rebel advances in the past month have cut off from Damascus and the Mediterranean coast.

“The problem with this strategy is that the Aleppo garrisons are now largely isolated. It is likely they will fall in the months to come,” he said.

:: The fresh clashes came as the opposition prepared for key talks starting in Qatar on Sunday, where the United States is expected to push for a new umbrella organisation to unite the country’s fractured regime opponents.

19/10/12

#Syria, FSA in Qunaitra (Golan) seizes a huge amount of heavy caliber ammo in a tank depot

#Syria #Golan Rebels seized weapons & ammunition in #Quneitra

13/10/12

#Syria, WEAPONS & AMMUNITION FINDS!

Syria #Idlib Rebels seized weapon & ammunition from checkpoint “Oil Factory” in #Saraqib

#Syria #Idlib Rebels seized RPG-granades in border-village Kafr Hum

GOLAN HEIGHTS // When they are not hiking or admiring bucolic vistas that stretch deep into Syria, tourists here can explore intact bunkers still covered in barbed wire or decommissioned Israeli tanks collecting rust in these fields.

They are relics of wars that engulfed the Golan Heights in the late 1960s and early 1970s, back when the UAE was newly independent and Arab states still fielded conventional armies against Israel.

They also are testaments to the relative tranquillity that has settled over this strategic plateau since 1973, when Israel and Syria last battled to control it. Lately, however, echoes of conflict have punctured the air. Last month, residents of Majdal Shams had to brace themselves because of mortar explosions just beyond the 1974 ceasefire line. The Syrian military had been attacking a village for several nights.

“My windows were rattling,” said Salman Fakherdeen, an activist who recalled listening to the explosions from his office.

It was the closest brush yet with Syria’s civil war for this community, on the northernmost fringe of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Although not directed at Israel, the bombardments have jolted Israeli officials. During a tour with military officials here in July, Ehud Barak, the defence minister, listened to the thumps reverberating over the boundary.

“It is getting closer,” he remarked.

That may not only have been a reference to attacks by the military of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad that have killed more than 20,000 people since an uprising against his rule began 18 months ago. It may also have been a prediction for the Syrian leader himself.

To be certain, Mr Al Assad’s removal would not be celebrated in the corridors of power in Israel. Over the last four decades, its boundary with Syria, which runs through the Golan, has been notable for, above all, quiet.

The countries are of course still bitter enemies, and Syrians, affronted by Israeli control of the Golan, consider reclaiming the area a national priority.

But the Syrian president and his father, Hafez, who ruled with an iron fist until his death in 2000, refrained for decades from trying to use force to take back the Golan Heights.

Successive military defeats forced the conclusion that fighting Israel head-on was an unwinnable strategy, convincing Damascus to turn to indirect confrontation by aiding anti-Israel groups such as Hizbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas.

Now, with Mr Al Assad’s grip on power slipping, Israelis here fear novel challenges such as refugee inflows and havens for radical Islamists.

“The future there is Al Qaeda, a new Pakistan,” said David Barel, 63, manager of Hunters Lodge hotel in Neve Ativ, one of about 30 Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights.

He wondered whether Israel would - or even could - negotiate a deal with Syria that would swap with it the Golan Heights for a peace agreement.

Israeli prime ministers from Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert had put forward the idea.

During his first tenures as prime minister in the 1990s, Benjamin Netanyahu, an arch supporter of settling territories occupied by Israel, recruited American businessman Ronald Lauder to broach the issue with Hafez Al Assad in 1998.

While Israel draws about a third of its water from the Golan Heights, the area lacks the biblical resonance of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, also occupied by Israel since 1967.

Yigal Kipnis, a historian at the University of Haifa, blamed the failure of past efforts to trade the Golan Heights on “emotions, nothing else”.

This was because of squabbles over the 1923 boundary that, carved out by imperial France and Britain, Israelis and Syrians used as a basis for negotiating the Golan Heights. The line used to hug the edge of the Sea of Galilee, offering the Syrian side access to the water.

But the waterline has since retreated, exposing between it and the shoreline several metres of land that both sides want to control.

That was a stumbling bloc during discussions in Geneva in 2000 between Hafez Al Assad and the US president Bill Clinton, who was acting as an intermediary for the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak.

“There were no Jews to the east of the lake,” Hafez Al Assad told the US leader, according to an account in Ahron Bregman’s Elusive Peace: How the Holy Land Defeated America, a book documenting regional peace efforts.

Mr Kipnis and other Israeli experts believe that with the right precautions, relinquishing the Golan Heights would not present Israel with serious security threats, despite the area’s elevated vantage points that Syrian forces used before 1967 to shell Israeli communities.

Such security precautions also require enforcement from a strong government in Damascus, which is not possible at the moment.

“When you are making a peace agreement to withdraw from the Golan Heights, you can’t base your decision on the current situation,” said Shlomo Brom, senior fellow at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies.

“You have to base your decision on what’s going to happen in the next 50 years, and you just don’t know what’s going to happen from now until then.”

A senior Israeli military official said that Israel is closely tracking events in Syria, fearing the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime could see the Syrian Golan Heights fall to groups like Al-Qaeda.

The military official told AFP that such a situation could create a dangerous security vacuum similar to Sinai.

“If the Assad regime will fall, the biggest threat is that the northern border, the no-man’s land, can be taken over by groups like Al-Qaeda,” the official in Israel’s northern command said on condition of anonymity.

The fear was that the strategic plateau could slide into a situation similar to that in Sinai, where a wave of lawlessness has left the Egyptian army struggling powerless to rein in militant activity.

Last year, gunmen snuck across the border from the Egyptian territory and carried out attacks in southern Israel that killed eight people.

“This could happen if the Assad regime collapses,” the official warned.

For Israel, the ongoing bloodshed in Syria has also raised fears that Damascus’s stockpile of sophisticated weapons could fall into the hands of militants, including Hezbollah, which fought a war with Israel in 2006.

Last month, Major General Yair Golan, head of the Israeli military’s northern command, said the concern was that Syria’s stockpile of strategic weapons, including “the world’s largest stockpile of chemical weapons,” could end up in Hezbollah’s hands.

The Israeli military official said that although Syrian weapons were continuously being passed to Hezbollah, he was “not aware” that any of them were chemical.

He said Assad’s fall was likely to deal a very heavy blow to Hezbollah, which stood to lose a key ally in terms of weapons and logistical support.

“Hezbollah is very worried about what is going on in Syria because all their logistics are there,” he said.

“If the Assad regime collapses, they will be alone in this region and will have no border with a friend that can help and support it. They are very worried about it,” he said. “That’s why Hezbollah is working very hard to support the Assad regime.”

Hezbollah’s main fear was losing the support of Assad, whose minority Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shia Islam.

“The top advisers from Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are helping Assad to slaughter his own people because they know that if Assad falls, this axis won’t work anymore because most of the [Syrian] people are Sunni,” he said.

But such an outcome could also benefit Israel, the official added.

“Without Syria, Hezbollah will be much more careful in its acts.”

The military source said he did not see a quick end to the bloodshed in Syria, which was likely to continue “for years.”

“Most of the army is loyal to Assad, he has money to pay their salaries. He is not going to run away,” he also said. “This could go on for years.”

But he added fears that Assad could try to deflect world attention by provoking a conflict with Israel had proven to be unfounded.

“The military forces and Assad know very well that if they start a war against Israel, he will lose and his whole regime will be under threat,” he said.

“Today the Syrian military force is not ready for any kind of war.”