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- Israel is threatening Syria with air strikes against
its military bases in south Lebanon if there are further border attacks
on Israeli soldiers or civilians by Hizbollah guerrillas.
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- Such warnings were
common during Israel's occupation
of south Lebanon but they have
resumed following fresh Hizbollah assaults.
They raise anew the
alarming spectre of a wider Middle East conflict.
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- The threat against Syria's
20,000 troops in Lebanon was
outlined yesterday by a senior Israeli
security source. He said Syria possessed
the power to rein in
Hizbollah, but instead Bashar al-Assad, its president,
encouraged it.
The Syrians did not understand the consequences of their
"dangerous policies", said the source.
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- Iranian-sponsored Hizbollah
recently renewed attacks
on Israel, capturing four soldiers in the last
two months and killing one
with a roadside bomb. It is acting on the
pretext that Israel is still
occupying the Shebaa Farms, a small pocket
of what it claims was originally
Lebanese land that was seized by Syria
in the 1940s and in 1967 occupied
by Israel as part of the Golan
Heights. The United Nations has ruled it
to be on the Israeli side of
the "blue line" that marks out the
Israeli-occupied Golan
from Lebanon.
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- Israel's annoyance with Syria's new young president has
been
heightened by disappointment that he has not proved any more likely
to
succumb to Israeli demands than his father, Hafez al-Assad, who died
in
June. The bizarre, but widely circulated notion that "Dr
Bashar's"
British training as an ophthalmologist and his interest
in computers would
soften his stance on Syrian interests making him,
in western eyes, a relative
"moderate" has predictably
proved to be no more than diplomatic
guff.
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- The Israeli military is alarmed
by Bashar al-Assad's
eagerness to forge closer relations with Iraq in
contrast to his father,
whose hostility towards Saddam Hussein reached
a peak in 1991 when he supported
Operation Desert Storm. Last month
Izzat Ibrahim, a member of the Revolutionary
Command Council, was the
most senior Iraqi official for two decades to
visit Damascus. Reports
abound that Iraq is piping oil to Syria in defiance
of
sanctions.
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- Bashar al-Assad "was expected to be more moderate
due to
his western education," said the Israeli security source, who
requested anonymity. "But he is behaving just the opposite way. He
is very extreme. He has turned very hard in the direction of the
Iraqis."
If Israel gets embroiled in a conflict with Damascus, the
source warned,
then Iraq would be "delighted" to join
in.
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- This
week, Israel bombarded a Lebanese town after a Hizbollah
bomb killed
one of its soldiers. But Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister,
has
held back from retaliation over the captured men three soldiers and
a
reserve colonel because he did not want to open another front while
battling the Palestinian intifada.
-
- Israeli troops shot dead two
more Palestinians yesterday
one, a 12-year-old boy after unrest
erupted following the first Friday
prayers of Ramadan.
-
- Although the Israel
Defense Forces principally blame
the Syrian president for their
embarrassing setbacks at the hands of Hizbollah,
it is also pointing a
finger at the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.
It claims that
the guerrillas who seized the three soldiers were disguised
as UN
peacekeepers, using equipment acquired from an Indian battalion.
A UN
spokesman has called the report incorrect. The story does, however,
smack of a larger Israeli publicity campaign an effort to undermine
Palestinian
efforts to persuade the United Nations to send an observer
force to the
occupied territories.
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