IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi on Thursday revealed during a conference on local government in Tel Aviv that during the 55-hour long Operation Breaking Dawn, Israeli forces attacked a third country at the same time they were attacking targets in the Gaza Strip. He did not specify which third country.
“Ten days ago, the IDF hit with great precision Tayseer Jabari, who is an arch-terrorist, and at the same time carried out a wave of arrests in Judea and Samaria, and attacked a third country, while carrying out the defense of the rest of the country’s borders,” Kochavi said.
Speculation rose as to the Chief of Staff’s purpose in revealing these details without specifying the “third country.” The IDF has been attacking regularly inside Syrian territory over the past decade, so Syria is the most logical possibility. And since Israel rarely accepts responsibilities for those overnight attacks on Iranian weapons and ammunition depots or convoys headed to Lebanon with new rockets for Hezbollah, Kochavi chose not to name the country this time either.
On August 14, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that two IDF missiles hit a regime military position in the Al-Qatifa area in Rif Dimashq, Syria, coinciding with strikes on military positions in Tartous.
Three Assad regime soldiers died and several were wounded, from an Israeli attack on a Syrian air-defense base and radar in Abo Asfa village, five kilometers south of Tartous.
Tartous is located on the Syrian coast, some five miles away from the Russian naval base.
Earlier, the Observatory reported Israeli strikes on the regime’s military positions, which hold Iranian militias in southern Tartous countryside, where several missiles hit the vicinity of Abo Afsa village, where several loud explosions were heard. Ambulances rushed to save the wounded people and collect the dead.
According to the Observatory, this was the 19th Israeli attack on Syrian territory since the beginning of 2022.
Another purpose for this revelation could be a threat to Israel’s neighbors that it is capable of attacking them even during a hot conflict in Gaza, I’m talking to you, Hassan Nasrallah.
But Kochavi’s effort to flex his muscles in the wake of Israel’s most successful surgical attack on enemy combatants with little repercussion in world opinion and no casualties at home raised a few eyebrows in Israel’s right-wing camp, where people were wondering if by saying he attacked a third country, the Chief of Staff didn’t also recognize Gaza and the Palestinian Authority as a Country.
