If Syria fails to repond to Israel attack, it will look weak

Dubai: A fireball exploded over Damascus early Sunday morning as Israeli missiles hit a target in the city’s hilly outskirts, the Syrian state news agency said.

It was the second such reported attack in less than a week, neither of which has been confirmed by Israel. An Israeli air strike on Friday against Syria targeted a shipment of missiles Tel Aviv claimed were bound for Hezbollah, AP reported on Saturday.

“If Israel has now done this twice with air strikes within the last 48 hours, its shadow conflict with Iran is no longer in the shadows, and this represents a serious escalation,” Jonathan Spyer, a political scientist at the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, said by telephone.

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and his officials will “use Israel’s involvement as yet another manifestation of their simplistic narrative about foreign forces trying to manipulate the masses,” said Tawfiq Rahim, a Dubai-based political analyst for the Middle East at GlobeSight, an emerging markets research company.

The strikes put the Al Assad regime in a tricky position. If it fails to respond, it looks weak and leaves itself vulnerable to such airstrikes more frequently. But if it retaliates militarily against Israel, it risks dragging the Jewish state and its powerful military into a broader conflict.

Uzi Rubin, a missile expert and former Defence Ministry official, told the AP that if the targets were Fateh-110 missiles as reported, then it is a game changer as they put almost all of Israel in range and can accurately hit targets.

Rubin emphasised that he was speaking as a rocket expert and had no details on reported strikes. “If fired from southern Lebanon, they can reach Tel Aviv and even [the southern city of] Beersheba.”

More accurate than scud missiles

He said the rockets are five times more accurate than the scud missiles that Hezbollah had fired in the past. “It is a game changer because they are a threat to Israel’s infrastructure and military installations,” he said.

Jamraya is the same area that Israel struck in January, which was the first attack inside Syria since the start of the March 2011 popular uprising against Al Assad that has morphed into a civil war that’s claimed more than 70,000 lives.

The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard has members in Syria as “advisers,” the group’s top commander said in September.

“If the Syrian regime is weakening and tries to move weapons to Hezbollah, Israel will assess its intelligence and capability to stop these movements,” Chatham’s Mekelberg said from London on Saturday. “What Israel is really apprehensive about is two scenarios: One, the movement of weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and two, Hezbollah opening a new front in the Golan Heights.”

Iran condemned the Israeli air strikes and urged regional countries to resist such acts of “aggression”, said foreign ministry spokesperson Ramin Mehman-Parast.

Need to lift arms embargo

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the attacks showed that peace across the whole region was under threat and reinforced the need to lift an arms embargo on Syrian rebels.

“We don’t have any official confirmation but, of course, there have been some sources in Israel saying that this has been an Israeli airstrike — I will wait before commenting in detail on that for official confirmation,” Hague told Sky News. “But what I can say is that these events, and many other events of recent days, do show increasing danger to the peace of that entire region from the Syria crisis just getting worse and worse.”

Hague added: “Lebanon is constantly threatened by being destabilised, huge numbers of refugees are crossing the border, Jordan is under incredible strain.

“And Israel has made very clear that it will act if it believes that important weapons systems are being transferred to Hezbollah.”

The British foreign minister said the growing threat to peace in the region from the Syrian crisis showed the need to increase assistance to the Syrian opposition.

He added that the “longer this goes on, the stronger the case becomes for lifting the arms embargoes” against the Syrian opposition. Britain is pushing the European Union to lift an arms embargo on Syria, which comes up for renewal at the end of May.

Hague meanwhile reiterated that there were “credible reports of chemical weapons being used against” the Syrian people, although he was not pressed on whether that had passed the West’s “red line” for intervention.

— Compiled from agencies