Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in his opening remarks to Sunday’s government cabinet meeting that although Israel has no interest in a conflict with Iran, if one is inevitable, it is better to deal with it now than later.
“We are determined to block Iranian entrenchment [in Syria], even at the cost of a confrontation,” Netanyahu said. “We have no interest in an escalation, but we are prepared for every scenario. We don’t want a confrontation – but if one must come, it’s better now than later.”
The prime minister also underscored the exceptional importance of his upcoming meeting this Wednesday in Moscow with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. “My meetings with the Russian president are always important for the IDF and the country,” he said, “but the meeting this week is especially important in light of the attempts by Iran to establish itself in Syria.”
Netanyahu meets regularly with Putin, and the two are on good terms. They last met for talks in January after they together attended a ceremony at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow to mark the 75th anniversary of the uprising of the inmates at the Sobibor concentration camp during the Holocaust.
During that meeting, Netanyahu warned Putin that Iran was building weapons factories in Lebanon, where its military advisers were attempting to manufacture precision weapons for use against Israel. He also warned that Iran was continuing to establish a permanent military presence in Syria – an existential threat to the State of Israel, which would not be allowed to continue, he warned.
Last week three Iranian bases were struck in Syria, including at least one being used as a major weapons depot. At least 200 surface-to-surface long-range missiles were destroyed and some 30 military personnel were killed, including many Iranian officials.
Iran issued a statement denying that any of its bases in Syria were targeted and said none of its soldiers were killed.
One day later, Netanyahu revealed the existence of more than 100,000 files detailing a comprehensive Iranian nuclear weapons development program that was put on hold a number of years ago, with its files carefully tucked away in a high-security storage facility in Tehran, obviously for future use.
In a daring operation earlier this year, Israel’s international Mossad intelligence agency managed to penetrate the facility, take the files and leave Iran all in the same night. After months of scrutinizing and painstakingly translating the documents together with the United States, Netanyahu revealed the contents of some of them last week, sending shock waves through Tehran.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, meanwhile also notified the UN Security Council in a briefing a week ago that Tehran has deployed some 80,000 Shi’ite fighters in Syria to support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The presence of such a formidable foreign military force across Israel’s northern border – as well as the increasing number of advanced weapons being transported by Iranian aircraft into Syria – is completely unacceptable, he told the Security Council, adding that Israel will “do what it must” to deal with the threat to its existence.
Iran has repeatedly declared its intention to “wipe the Zionist state (Israel) off the map.”