Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday held a security briefing atop a strategic Syrian mountain inside the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights that Israel seized this month, Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz said.
Netanyahu, Katz and the heads of the armed forces and the domestic security agency visited “outposts at the summit of Mount Hermon for the first time since they were seized by the military,” Katz’s office said.
“The summit of Mount Hermon serves as Israel’s eyes for identifying both near and distant threats,” the defense minister said.
Photo: The Israeli Government Press Office via AP
Netanyahu’s office said the meeting took place on the “Hermon ridge” and said the prime minister “reviewed the [army’s] deployment in the area and set guidelines for the future.”
In a video statement from the summit, the prime minister said Israeli troops would remain there “until another solution ensuring Israel’s security is found.”
Netanyahu ordered Israeli troops to seize the buffer zone as former president Bashar al-Assad’s rule collapsed in Syria.
The Israeli move was a breach of a 1974 armistice which set up the zone to separate Israeli and Syrian forces on the Golan Heights following the previous year’s Arab-Israeli war, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.
Israel has framed the move as temporary and defensive, with Netanyahu saying it was in response to a “vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone.”
Israeli forces have also been operating in areas beyond the buffer zone in Syrian-controlled territory, the military has confirmed.
Katz told the meeting of the importance of “completing preparations ... for the possibility of a prolonged presence,” the statement said.
He added that the summit of Mount Hermon, home to the world’s highest UN observation post at 2,814m above sea level, provided “observation and deterrence” against Hezbollah in Lebanon and rebels in Damascus who “claim to present a moderate front, but are affiliated with the most extreme Islamist factions.”
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Muslim group that led the rebel overthrow of al-Assad, has its roots in al-Qaeda and remains proscribed as a terrorist organization by several Western governments and the UN. The group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has distanced himself from that past and attempted to assure Syrians and outsiders that its fighters would respect religious minorities.
Israel first conquered the Golan Heights during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community as a whole.
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