21-Oct-17: Early-morning rocket fire deep into northern Israel today and IDF believes the Syrians meant it this time

Damascus today: Iranians on the left, Syrians on the right, Iran's Maj. Gen.
Mohammad Bagheri in the middle shaking hands with Syria's top military
officer Gen. Ali Ayoub. The military agreement they signed is described
below [Image Source]

Israel's Syria border has been relatively quiet for decades. But the recent and ongoing geo-strategic changes in the Middle East (think: Iran) mean the likelihood of substantial changes there - for the worse - is on the minds of everyone in the Israeli security establishment.

Here's what we know about the events of today (Saturday).

Times of Israel, in a report entitled "Israel believes rocket fire from Syria may have been deliberate" says five rockets were fired across its border from Syria early this morning (Saturday). While earlier incoming rockets (there have been many this year already - most recently this past Thursday) have been called incidental to the ferocious blood-letting in Syria, today's

"may have been deliberately launched at Israel, rather than constituting errant spillover from clashes in Syria, military sources said late Saturday. Israel fired back into Syria, hitting three rocket launchers, in response to the rocket fire, and warned that further fire would prompt a more intensive response... Channel 2 news reported that although the IDF officially referred to “spillover” fire in its statements Saturday, there was “a growing sense” in the army that the Syrian fire was deliberate..." [Times of Israel, today]

Today's rockets were all fired into Israel around 5 am. Four fell relatively deeply inside Israeli territory and according to Times of Israel set off Code Red (Tzeva Adom) alarms in several locations. It's still believed at this stage that all crashed onto open ground without causing injury or damage, though one "landed close to an Israeli residential area."

Israeli suspicions start with the assessment that  no fighting was going on in any relevant part of Syria at the time of the fire. The Syrian army fully controls the specific area from which they were fired. And they landed far from the Syrian frontier.  And this:

Concluding a visit to Syria on Saturday, the commander of Iran’s armed forces signed a memorandum of understanding with Syrian officials in which the two allies announced plans for tighter military cooperation and coordination — notably against Israel. [Times of Israel, today]

More about that below.

All sides - Syria, Israel, Iran - have been making statements.

The Syrian defense ministry says Israel arranged for the rocket attack on its territory:

"The terrorists, acting at the behest of Israel, shelled empty ground to provide a pretext for this aggression..." [Turkish news site Daily Sabah, today]

The IDF doesn't think it attacked itself and issued this blunt warning:

“The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to harm the sovereignty of the State of Israel and the security of its residents, and considers the Syrian regime responsible for what is happening in its territory... Even if this is just spillover, this is an exceptional incident and the continuance of such events will be met with a more fierce Israeli response... ” [IDF statement quoted by Times of Israel, today]

And Bagheri, the Iranian, said just three days ago from Damascus [source] where he arrived a day earlier that he was there to coordinate

“in order to fight our common enemies — whether they are the Zionists or the terrorists. We discussed ways to strengthen relations in the future and outlined the basic principles of this cooperation... We cannot accept a situation where the Zionist entity attacks Syria from the ground and the air”.

Associated Press today added to what we know about the unusual Syrian junket by Iran's most senior military officer:

The Chief of Staff of Iran's armed forces, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, is on an official visit to Syria. He toured the front lines in the northern province of Aleppo and discussed military cooperation with President Bashar Assad... Syria and its strong backer Iran signed a joint memorandum of understanding for developing cooperation and coordination between the two countries' armies... [The] memo was signed between the two countries' chiefs of staffs [and] provides for exchanging military expertise and intelligence and technology information in a way that can boost the two countries' capability for fight terrorism, according to [Syria's] state news agency SANA. Iran has been one of Syrian President Bashar Assad's strongest supporters since the country's crisis began in 2011 and has sent thousands of Iranian-backed militiamen to boost his troops against opponents.

Meanwhile, Israel National News says the IDF fire in the hours after the Syrian rocketry "destroyed three Syrian artillery cannons".

31-Mar-15: The other Iran, the one with less need of Swiss hotel rooms and press conferences

One of a collection of snapshots published in December 2014 on an
Iranian military website under the headline "We come..." depicts
uniformed Iranian soldiers touring southern Lebanon, close to the
border with Israel [Iranian source]

Israel, and especially our country's border zone, is often described as tense.

This might seem odd so long as no actual shooting or rocket firing is taking place. Some might seet it as paranoia, maybe even war-mongering.

But it's less so to Israelis. Many of us understand that the general level of a population's anxiety is a function of the extent to which real and physical threats are reported. If you don't know they are there, or choose to look in the other direction, you may feel more relaxed.

But that does not mean there are no enemies, or that they are not deployed out there.

Here's part of a chilling news report about our northern border ("Iranian troops advance towards Israeli border") from yesterday's Times of London:

Iran is close to putting its forces on Israel’s northeast border for the first time, as its allies crush rebel groups in the Golan Heights area of Syria. The prospect of Iranian troops being posted on a frontier that has been calm for decades is causing alarm in Israel, and comes as international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions near a climax.
“Iran will be so close to the Israelis that it will no longer need long-range missiles to hit them,” said Abu Ali, a fighter with Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah organisation who has served multiple combat tours in Syria...
Mortar fire and heavy machineguns are audible daily from the area as Hezbollah fights Syrian rebel forces, some of them aligned with al-Qaeda.
Israel assesses that the Syrian government army, apart from some artillery units, is largely exhausted. With its best divisions stationed around Damascus, the Assad regime is now leaving the fight in the south to Iran and its proxies. A spokesman for the Syrian rebel forces in southern Syria, Major Issam el-Rayyes, said that 80 per cent of a 5,000-strong force attacking rebels around the Golan Heights were Iranian-backed militias, including Hezbollah, but also Shia fighters from Yemen, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
The offensive into the southern region of Daraa and Quneitra, bordering the Golan Heights, began in February. It is the first time that Iranian forces have operated openly in southern Syria.

Same Iranian, same Lebanon/Israel border

“Iran is on the march, its proxies are taking territory,” an Israeli official said.
Abu Ali confirmed that Iranian troops were on the ground. “We are taking the area square by square until we reach the border with Israel.” ...From August to October last year, rebel groups gained territory along the southern half of the Golan Heights adjacent to the Israeli line, leaving only one village in the northern border area under Syrian government control.

Israel has offered medical assistance to more than a thousand wounded Syrian rebels and civilians, in a medical centre in the town of Zefat — but the Assad regime has accused Israel of going beyond humanitarian aid, and providing rebels with weapons, ammunition, communications equipment and tactical intelligence. This pragmatic decision to be a “good neighbour” to Syrian rebels — even though some elements are affiliated to al-Qaeda — appears to be aimed at countering the more pressing threat from Iran.
Abu Ali said that, over the past year, a military infrastructure of bunkers and tunnels had been constructed in parts of the Golan Heights under the Assad regime control — echoing the facilities Hezbollah built in south Lebanon before a month-long war with Israel in 2006. “We are almost ready,” he said.On January 18, Israeli drones targeted a convoy of vehicles near Quneitra, on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, killing an Iranian general and six Hezbollah fighters. The highly unusual attack was interpreted as a forceful message to Iran to stay away from the Golan Heights. It appears to have fallen on deaf ears...

Is it paranoia if they say at every opportunity they really are out to attack your home and community? And they have colossal means of doing so?

16-May-13: Syria may or may not have launched an attack on Israel this morning

The caption on this AFP press photo says it depicts
a poster in Naqura, Lebanon with Bashar Assad,
Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah  and Iranian president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. [Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP]

Several rounds of mortar fire have hit Israeli territory in the Golan Heights, close to the border with Syria, in recent weeks. The tone of the news reporting has been to convey that these were fired more or less by accident, part of the wild shooting-in-all-directions that is going on in the deadly Syrian bedlam, part of the ongoing bloodbath and murderous orgy.

This morning (Thursday), two mortar rounds were fired from Syria into the Golan region. Evidently directed at the Mt Hermon ski resort site, they exploded harmlessly. Fortunately, no one was injured and there are no reports of damage.

David Lev, writing on the Israel National News site today, says credit was claimed for today's firing by something called the “Shahid Brigades of the Abd al-Kajr al-Husseini Jihad Brigades”. Since adopting ferocious names actually costs nothing, it might be of no significance that this SBAKHJB entity claims to be part of something larger called “Free Palestine Movement”. But what does it all indicate? According to Lev:

The group [this SBAKHJB entity] apparently works in coordination with the Syrian government, which declared several weeks ago that it would encourage terror attacks against Israel, in the wake of the bombing of convoys that were transporting chemical weapons from Syria to Hizbullah terrorists. In a video message, the group said that it fired the rockets on the occasion of “Nakba Day,” the date Arabs have chosen to mourn their defeat when Israel was established in 1948. “We are taking revenge for the martyrs that have killed,” the message said. “We tell the Zionists that we are opening a campaign of revenge” [Israel National News]

If indeed the blood-soaked regime of the beleaguered Syrian despot [see "Arabs and Turkey see no role for al-Assad"] is behind this, then the timing might not have that much connection to those self-evidently-bogus claims of solidarity with Palestinian brothers etc etc.

More likely it's a Syrian riposte to a blunt well-publicized Israeli message to Damascus delivered yesterday:

Israel has warned Damascus that if President Assad chooses to hit back at Israel for any further Israeli military strikes, Israel will bring down his regime. An Israeli official confirmed Wednesday night that a dramatic and unprecedented message to this effect had been conveyed to Damascus, Channel 2 news reported... [Times of Israel]

They're quite a force to be reckoned with, these Al Assad forces. On the BBC World website, they reported a few hours ago that

The BBC has been shown evidence apparently corroborating reports of a chemical attack in Syria last month. A BBC correspondent who visited the northern town of Saraqeb was told by eyewitnesses that government helicopters had dropped at least two devices containing poisonous gas. The government has vehemently denied claims it has used chemical agents. The US has warned that such a development would be a "red line" for possible intervention... 

How credible are these latest reports?

Doctors at the local hospital told the BBC's Ian Pannell they had admitted eight people suffering from breathing problems. Some were vomiting and others had constricted pupils, they said. One woman, Maryam Khatib, later died. A number of videos passed to the BBC appear to support these claims, but it is impossible to independently verify them. Mrs Khatib's son Mohammed had rushed to the scene to help his mother and was also injured in the attack... "It was a horrible, suffocating smell. You couldn't breathe at all. You'd feel like you were dead. You couldn't even see. I couldn't see anything for three or four days" Mr Khatib told the BBC. A doctor who treated Mrs Khatib said her symptoms corresponded to organophosphate poisoning and that samples had been sent for testing... The BBC has been told that samples from the scene and from the alleged victims have been sent to Britain, France, Turkey and America for testing... Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer at the UK's Joint Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear Regiment, said the testimony and evidence from Saraqeb was "strong, albeit incomplete"... Both the US and UK have spoken of growing evidence that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons.[BBC]

Respectable assessments say Syria has stocks of mustard gas and sarin, a highly toxic nerve agent.

The CIA also believes that Syria has attempted to develop more toxic and more persistent nerve agents, such as VX gas. A report citing Turkish, Arab and Western intelligence agencies put Syria's stockpile at approximately 1,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, stored in 50 towns and cities... [BBC] 

All things considered, the anxiety of Israeli defence forces arrayed across the Golan, as well as ordinary Israelis living in the north, is quite understandable.

12-Apr-13: This is how things look on Israel's border with Syria, "the world's largest weapons warehouse"

Today's Syria: This was Aleppo [Image Source: Christian Science Monitor/Reuters] in August 2012.
Since then it has gotten worse.

The terrorist organization called Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, is reported this week to have merged with the Syrian terrorists who call themselves Jabhat al-Nusra. Post-blending, the two will operate as The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant [source: "Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra make it official", Christian Science Monitor, April 11, 2013]

Jabhat al-Nusra is reputed to be one of the best supplied - and therefore one of the fastest growing - of the Syrian opposition fighting groups, with much of its support believed to come from Arab states, statelets and oil-rich emirates of the Gulf. It was officially designated a terrorist organization in December 2012 by the US State Department which pointed out at the time that Jabhat al-Nusra

"has sought to portray itself as part of the legitimate Syrian opposition while it is, in fact, an attempt by AQI to hijack the struggles of the Syrian people for its own malign purposes.”

It's a little noted but important part of the horrifying bloodbath taking place north of Israel's border: more than 65,000 dead as of this month, and March 2013 was the bloodiest month so far [source: Syrian Observatory for Human Rights]. For a sense of what this means on the ground - we mean Israeli ground - there are some remarkably frank quotes from authoritative Israelis reported in an article ["Israeli Soldiers Enter Syrian Golan Heights"] by Inna Lazareva, a British journalist based in Tel Aviv and published on the Al Monitor site two weeks ago.

Lazareva quotes the most recent report of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon on the work of UNDOF, the UN Disengagement Observer Force (established by the UN in May 1971 to keep the peace on the Syria/Israel border). We wrote a month ago [see "10-Mar-13: On Israel's Syria border, the UN 'peacekeepers' are afraid to go out after dark"] about the kidnapping of 21 UNDOF military personnel by the Syrian 'opposition'. UNDOF until recently included soldiers/peacekeepers from six countries. Today, only the Philippines, India and Austria remain because of the heightened and growing danger. Some excerpts from Lazareva's article follow, some of them quite surprising and almost entirely unreported elsewhere:

• "On March 8, while 21 UN observers were being held captive by Syrian rebels, another group of observers was running for their lives. Caught up in fighting between the Syrian army and rebels, they fled down a steep mountain. There, they were helped by Israeli Defense Forces soldiers who entered the Syrian Golan Heights to rescue them.
• [The UN troops came under attack and according to Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch, deputy commander of the IDF's Depth Corps] "had to leave their posts [and] escaped by going down the cliff and climbing by foot to the Israeli border... They were in a very bad situation,” and IDF soldiers had to cross into the buffer zone to rescue them.
• "Yet the danger is not limited to the UN forces deployed there. The [Ban Ki Moon] report also warns that the instability in the Syrian Golan, particularly the buffer zone with Israel, could “jeopardize the cease-fire between the two countries and the stability of the region.”
• “Today, half of the Syrian Golan Heights is captured by the rebels, and not held by the Syrian army anymore,” said Hirsch, emphasizing Israel’s extreme concern about the situation on its northern border. Calling the area “ungoverned,” he described it as controlled “by many fundamentalists who are just running to this area in order to capture bases and build their infrastructure to use it later against Israel.” Israel is now building a high-tech fence system on its border with Syria to stop infiltrators.
• “The main problem in Syria,” Hirsch said, “is its huge, huge store of weapons.” Syria has become “one of the biggest warehouses for weapons in the world, including weapons of mass destruction.” 
• "He added, “That’s a huge threat for us because we don’t know who will capture the WMDs and the advanced weapons that Russia supplied over the years to Syria, and who will be able to use them against Israel or, via the terror organizations already here, on the rest of the world in terror activities.”
• "One group in particular, Jabat Al Nusra... is operating increasingly closer to the Israeli border... Israeli government sources said that despite al-Nusra having set up just 14 months ago, it has carried out more attacks and inflicted more damage on the Syrian regime than any other opposition organization. 
• "Itamar Rabinovitch, a professor of Middle East history at Tel Aviv University and Israel’s former ambassador to the US, said the activities of Jabat al-Nusra are “potentially very serious, in two ways. One is that when Assad falls — and I think it’s a question of ‘when,’ not a question of ‘if,’ the central government might be replaced by an Islamist or perhaps even a jihad-oriented, radical Islamist movement. The second is that there may be a terrorist or a jihadi takeover over parts of the country, and the country could at least for a while become fragmented, with the Alawites and the Kurds having autonomy and jihadi elements … possibly even gaining control of some of the weapons of mass destruction. Some of these areas may be close to the cease-fire line with Israel, and in that case, Israel will have to deal with it.”
• [Meanwhile according to Hirsch] “Hezbollah, as a front guard of Iran, acts here, trying their best to preserve and restore Assad’s rule [and] preparing this area [Syria] as a launching site for terrorism [in addition to their deep emplacements in Lebanon]
• "One Israeli university academic, an expert on Islamist movements who prefers to remain anonymous, said that Jabat al-Nusra has two aims. In the short term, “they want to make war against Assad... There’s no doubt that after they succeed in ousting Assad, they will open another front against ‘the crusaders... After they succeed in the first stage, they will continue onto the ‘main’ stage: the quest for the 'Bilad el Sham' — a name in Islam for the district of Syria, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon. The historical Syria, the greater Syria. There are traditions from Prophet Muhammad about the importance of this specific district in the Day of Judgement, and this is a very important foundation to the motivation of al-Qaeda for using the situation in Syria to make war against Israel.”

Arab-on-Arab atrocities, a daily part of Syria's civil bloodbath: This image
[source] from the Times of London and published
on October 14, 2012, shows a Jabhat al-Nusra gunman
cold-bloodedly pumping bullets into prone Syrian soldiers in Aleppo 

So how is Israel dealing with this apocalyptic threat? As usual, in ways that are little known and even less appreciated. Following are some excerpts from a lengthy analysis ["Israel may be operating in Syria", Noga Tarnopolsky] published in Canada's GlobalPost on Wednesday:

• "Israeli military personnel are operating in non-combat capacity in an area across Israel‘s border with Syria, GlobalPost has learned... Israeli security forces have entered Syrian territory to identify wounded Syrians and administer basic medical care across the border.
• "A senior Israeli source told GlobalPost that wounded Syrian rebels who have received medical care in Israel “are transported across the border only once they are positively identified and receive initial emergency medical treatment while still on the other side,” meaning on Syrian soil. This indicates a much higher level of activity by Israel in rebel-held lands than has previously been acknowledged. 
• "It also is a sign that Israel is willing to put some of its own personnel in significant peril in order to retain some semblance of order at the national boundary line.
• Late last month, after 11 Syrian citizens were treated in Israeli hospitals, AFP reported that the Israeli army set up a field hospital on the Israeli-Syrian border to provide emergency care on-site. The army spokesman has refused to comment on the report.
• [Quoting a retired senior officer who commanded the IDF's Golan Division until he retired in August 2012] "Behind the scenes there are steps being taken to prepare. We haven’t set up a field hospital for thousands. But there is some preparation, more ambulances, more doctors, more medical equipment. We’re ready. It’s only logical... It’s a terrible situation there. Injured people are dying in the field because of a lack of medical treatment. Sometimes they just bleed. If possible, caring for them on the border without bringing them into Israel is better. I think the army is doing things in the field... The State of Israel doesn’t need to take sides in the war...”
• "Israeli Defense Forces spokesman, Capt. Eytan Buchman, did not deny the possibility. In a written statement, he replied, “The IDF places a great deal of importance on the provision of humanitarian care when necessary. As such, we have provided initial medical assistance to a number of Syrians over the past few months. We cannot at this time comment on the process that takes place during such incidents. The IDF’s primary goal is to provide for the safety and security of the State of Israel and its residents.”

The Canadian report quotes the director of Acute Care Surgery at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital:

“A severely wounded patient came to us after having been operated on elsewhere”...adding that his surgical records were written down in Hebrew, on unmarked pages. “The patient arrived with gunshot injuries to the stomach and left chest, liver and diaphragm injuries and also chest wall right lung injury. He arrived here to the surgical ICU two days after initial surgical interventions were performed.” The unidentified patient eventually regained consciousness and was weaned from a ventilator. He remains under 24 hour a day guard. Doctors expect to release him soon. Asked whether he knew anything about the identity or the provenance of his patient, Bahouth replied, “I never ask. I have no idea. I’m not interested. I received the information I received and we managed his care and stabilized him. We did our job... In general,” he said, reflecting on years of trauma care, “I’ve learned not really to believe what patients with gunshot wounds or the victims of knifings tell you. They always have something to hide. So I don’t ask.”

Keep the image of those Israeli soldiers providing emergency medical care to Syrians as you slowly raise your eyes to the two photos we reproduced above, both of them from Aleppo, a city of two million plus, larger than Damascus and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The devastation and savagery; the merciless destruction and sacking; the religious zealotry that underlies it all. That's what Syria looks like from here. 

6-Aug-06: Disproportionality argument starts to fade

To the evident satisfaction of the Vatican and leaders of most European countries, the disproportionality of losses between Lebanese and Israelis has undergone a significant re-alignment in the past 48 hours.

The tragic deaths of a mother and her two daughters in their own home in the Israeli village of Arab Daramshe on Saturday, almost entirely un-noticed and un-reported by news media outside Israel, pushed the death toll up, as did developments this morning. 

A fifteen minute-long barrage of Katyusha missile attacks on Sunday struck Kfar Giladi, Ma'alot, Safed, Acre, the Golan Heights and numerous open areas in the north. Initial reports say ten Israelis were killed in this morning's attacks, and many others injured. Additional missiles are landing as we write these lines.

Hezbollah's missile firings are always essentially pot-shots. 

This is by no means a strategic problem for the Lebanese Shi'ites since they have never pretended to be engaged in a strategic battle. Every loss of human life - and certainly including Israeli Arab lives, which happen to be over-represented among the Israeli casualties - on the Israeli side of the border is a victory for Nasrallah's barbarians. Any act of violence qualifies as "resistance", and there is a ready supply of media dupes ready to buy and repackage their spun stories.

Part of the freedom that comes from being designated a terror organization under United States, UK, Canadian and Australian law, but not under the laws of most European countries or of the EU, is that Hezbullah can shoot anywhere it likes. Anything that dies or is destroyed can then be treated as an achievement.

So long as Hizbollah can spin the news as effectively as it has done so far, even the deaths of Lebanese advance their cause. While this will sound odd to many ordinary people unversed in the finer points of press coverage, the editors of such sober and object publications as The Independent (UK) understand this well.