Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Monday that his country had struck “chemical weapons” in neighbouring Syria, where rebel forces ousted president Bashar al-Assad over the weekend.
Speaking at a press conference, Saar said “we attacked strategic weapon systems like, for example, remaining chemical weapons or long-range missiles and rockets in order that they will not fall in the hands of extremists”.
Opposition groups led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, which captured Damascus over the weekend, are people with “an extreme ideology of radical Islam,” Saar said in a briefing on Monday.
The toppling of Syria’s long-time ruler Assad, after a dramatic territorial advance by rebel forces, has sent shock waves through the Middle East and made neighbouring Israel particularly wary. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was formally in a state of war with Assad, the emergence of a new Islamist power base in its immediate vicinity adds another threat after more than a year fighting Iran-backed militant groups.
HTS is designated a terrorist organisation by the US, Israel’s closest ally.
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Two weeks to Damascus: how Syrian rebels toppled the Assad regime
Two weeks to Damascus: how Syrian rebels toppled the Assad regime
Netanyahu said on Sunday he ordered the Israeli military to take control of a buffer zone east of the border with Syria, an area the army says is about 155 square miles in size. Science Minister Gila Gamliel, a member of Netanyahu’s security cabinet, told Tel Aviv radio station 103FM that all the zone “and beyond” was now under Israeli control. Saar disputed this, saying troops are positioned less than two miles from the border.
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