by Daniel Siryoti, Eli Leon, Shlomo Cesana, Danny Brenner, Lilach Shoval, Yoni Hirsch, News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
Hezbollah says rebels using Israeli weapons • IDF calls claims "a desperate attempt to divert attention" • U.N. rejects Russian offer to send troops to replace peacekeepers on Golan Heights • Anti-Hezbollah rhetoric reaches fever pitch across Middle East.
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu: "Israel cannot place its security in the hands of
international forces"
|
Photo credit: AP  |
A Syrian rebel surveys the
destruction following a battle with Syrian regime forces [Archive]
|
Photo credit: AP 
Israelis and tourists watch
fires caused by fighting in Syria from Mount Bental on the Golan
Heights, near the Syrian border, Friday
|
Photo credit: AP 
A U.N. soldier stands next
to a shelter inside a U.N. base on Friday, near the Quneitra crossing
between Israel and Syria
|
Photo credit: AP 
Shiekh Youssef al-Qaradawi,
gives a sermon at Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, Egypt [Archive]
|
Photo credit: AP 
As security concerns continue to rise in the
wake of the fierce battles in Syria, officials in Damascus are accusing
Israel of aiding the rebels.
"The Zionist regime is trying to crush the
resistance and is arming the terrorists in Syria," President Bashar
Assad's senior adviser, Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, told the Lebanon-based
Al-Mayadeen network over the weekend. Shaaban also claimed that rebels
wounded in clashes at the Quneitra border crossing late last week, who
received treatment in Israeli hospitals, were actually undercover
Israeli agents.
Officials in Israel continued to deny any involvement in Syria.
Journalist Nabil Abu Shaab, author of the blog
"U.N. Report," reported Saturday that the Israel Defense Forces had
come close to taking action in response to Syrian army tank movements
during the skirmishes in Quneitra.
According to Shaab, the Syrian army
"reinforced its presence in the area of separation with five main battle
tanks and five armored personnel carriers, moving in the direction of
Quneitra ... The Israel Defense Forces informed the UNDOF force
commander that should the movement of [the Syrian army's] tanks
continue, the IDF would take action ... The [Syrian military] informed
the UNDOF force commander that the presence of the tanks was solely for
the purpose of fighting the armed members of the opposition and asked
that the IDF not take action."
Hezbollah television station Al-Manar also
reported finding an array of Israeli weapons and equipment in the city
of Qusair, where Hezbollah fighters have helped the Syrian army retake
control of the city, strategically placed on the Lebanese border.
According to the report from Qusair, the weapons found in the ravaged
city included mortar rounds and flares with Hebrew writing on them, as
well as an Uzi sub-machine gun, allegedly given to the rebels by Israel.
IDF officials called the report a "desperate
attempt to divert attention from Hezbollah's involvement in Syria." The
officials said the military equipment with the Hebrew writing was likely
left from before Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
Russia bids to save U.N. peacekeeping force on Golan Heights
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile,
opened Sunday's cabinet meeting by announcing that he had spoken with
Russian President Vladimir Putin over the weekend about the situation in
Syria. Moscow intends to transfer advanced the S-300 anti-aircraft
missile defense system to Damascus, despite the U.S.'s and Israel's
objections.
"We discussed matters pertaining to Syria,
where the situation is getting more complex by the day," Netanyahu said.
"We saw just last week the fighting that took place near our border on
the Golan. Israel will not interfere in the civil war in Syria, as long
as the fire is not aimed at us."
The prime minister said Israel trusted only itself to protect its borders.
"The disintegration of the U.N. force
on the Golan highlights the fact that Israel cannot place its security
in the hands of international forces. They can be a part of [future]
arrangements, but they cannot be the basis of Israel's security," he
said.
Putin, for his part, suggested Friday that
Russian troops replace the U.N. peacekeeping force stationed in the
demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria on the Golan Heights.
Putin's proposal to replace the withdrawing
Austrian peacekeeping contingency was rejected by the U.N., which said
that an agreement between Israel and Syria barred permanent members of
the Security Council from the U.N. observer mission.
"We appreciate the consideration that the
Russian Federation has given to provide troops to the Golan," U.N.
spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters. "However, the Disengagement
Agreement and its protocol, which is between Syria and Israel, do not
allow for the participation of permanent members of the Security Council
in UNDOF [the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force]."
British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, president
of the Security Council this month, said after a special council
session on the UNDOF crisis that the force should remain in place, even
if its numbers were temporarily reduced.
The U.N. peacekeeping department is asking the
other countries in the force, the Philippines and India, if they would
increase their troop contributions and was also looking at the
possibility of new countries sending troops, Lyall Grant said.
"At the same time [they are] trying to
encourage the Austrians to slow down their departure from the theater
and dissuade any other troop contributors from withdrawing troops," he
said. U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous had talked about increasing
the force back to its mandated figure of 1,250, Lyall Grant said.
Fiji has said that it will send troops to
replace a Croatian contingent that has already pulled out. Japanese
troops have also been withdrawn because of the violence.
Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said
his country was well aware of the limitation in the document signed four
decades ago, and this was why Putin had said it would depend on whether
the countries in the region -- namely Syria and Israel -- and the U.N.
wanted Russian troops there.
"We believe that times have changed," Churkin
told reporters, adding that it was theoretically possible to amend the
protocol that bars permanent council members from UNDOF.
"The document was signed 39 years ago at the
height of [the] Cold War and the whole context of the [Arab-Israeli] war
in 1973," he said. "Now the context is completely different and UNDOF
seems to be in dire straits. So we are offering essentially to rescue
UNDOF."
Anti-Hezbollah rhetoric reaches fever pitch
Across the Arab and Muslim world over the
weekend, Sunni Muslim preachers condemned Iran and its "Satanic" Shiite
allies in Friday sermons.
In Saudi Arabia, a bastion of hard-line Sunni
theology and opposition to Iran, a senior cleric aligned with the
U.S.-allied government spoke of a Shiite "plot against Islam" that was
made newly apparent in the assault by Hezbollah fighters on Qusair. The
battle there has inflamed sectarian rhetoric which risks spreading
violence around the Middle East.
In Qatar, the International Association of
Muslim Scholars, a Sunni body headed by influential cleric Sheikh
Youssef al-Qaradawi, condemned the "Qusair massacre" and called for "a
day of rage" in support of the Syrian people next Friday, according to a
statement posted online.
In Egypt, by far the most populous Arab state,
where the Arab Spring protests of 2011 brought the Sunni Islamist
Muslim Brotherhood to power, a leading cleric and Brotherhood member led
televised prayers on Friday in which he described Hezbollah ("the party
of God" in Arabic) as "the party of Satan."
"God, break the backs of Bashar and his
supporters," Salah Sultan, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council
for Islamic Affairs, said at a Cairo mosque. "God, break the back of
Hezbollah, the party of Satan; God, break the back of Iran."
In the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli,
where Shiites and Sunnis have fought, hard-line cleric Sheikh Bilal
Baroudi told worshippers: "Hezbollah is responsible for the consequences
of this jihad invasion against Sunnis in Qusair. The response that is
coming will be harsh."
In Beirut, where the Shiite southern suburbs
erupted in joy after the fall of Qusair, prominent Sunni preacher Da'i
al-Islam al-Shahhal urged followers to resist Iranian attempts to
control Iraq, Lebanon and Syria as a step to conquering the Gulf states.
"I call on all those zealous and concerned to help us," he said. "Stand
with us financially and morally to foil the plan."
Senior Saudi cleric Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan, in
comments in the Al-Madina newspaper, said Shiites "pretend to be
Muslims and try to get closer to the Sunnis ... in order for them to be
able to plot against Islam ... these days their hostility has become
more apparent in their war against the Sunnis in Syria."
Appeals for a united front, notably against
Israel, which once won Hezbollah widespread respect among Sunni Arabs,
now fall on deaf ears following the Shiite movement's overt drive to
save Assad and provide a bulwark for Iranian influence.
As one Lebanese woman in a Sunni neighborhood
of Beirut put it, as she listened with disdain to festivities echoing
from a Shiite stronghold after Hezbollah's victory at Qusair: "What are
they celebrating? You'd think they'd liberated Jerusalem."
In the Gaza Strip, whose Palestinian Hamas
rulers were once allies of Assad and Hezbollah, cleric Imad al-Daya told
worshippers that Qusair had exposed the "fraud" of Hezbollah's rhetoric
about leading "resistance" to Israel.
"Wake up," he told worshippers. "This is a war of religion." Shiites, he added, had always been "a knife in Muslims' backs."
Violence in Syria continues unabated
In the central Syrian city of Homs, a suicide
bomber detonated his explosives-laden car Saturday, tearing through an
area largely populated by the regime's Alawite sect and killing seven
people, a state-owned TV station reported.
Syrian state TV also said Saturday that
government troops took control of the village of Buwaydah between Qusair
and Homs after intensive clashes.
Abu Bilal al-Homsi, an activist in the old
quarter of the city of Homs who has links with several rebel groups,
said via Skype that rebels sustained heavy losses late Friday as they
attempted to flee the village with their wounded and civilians. Al-Homsi
asked to be identified by his alias because of security concerns.
The state-owned Al-Ikhbariya TV said the
attacker detonated the explosives-laden car in a busy area near a
roundabout in the Homs neighborhood of Adawiya, which largely houses
Alawites. The report said the seven killed included three women and a
teenager, and said 10 other people were wounded as the blast heavily
damaged nearby houses and vehicles.
Television footage showed frantic residents
running around, blood splattered on the ground and a badly mangled car.
Other cars on the street were also damaged. A reporter from the station
on the scene said the car was carrying about 100 kilograms (220 pounds)
of explosives.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights, which relies on a network of informants inside Syria, confirmed
that the car was booby-trapped. It also said seven were killed, citing
preliminary reports.
Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack,
but car bombs are the usual tactic employed by Sunni extremists among
the rebel ranks.
Government forces also battled rebel fighters
north of Aleppo and by a military air base that has been under rebel
siege for weeks. Clashes in the suburbs of Damascus, meanwhile, left
seven people dead, including a rebel and a medic who was treating a
wounded fighter, according to the Observatory.
In fighting elsewhere, rebels attacked a
checkpoint manned by troops and pro-government gunmen in the central
town of Salamiyeh, killing 11 of them and wounding more than 20, the
Observatory said. It added that several rebels also were killed,
although it did not have a specific figure.
The Lebanese Red Cross announced that it has evacuated
38 people who were wounded in Qusair from the Syrian border to hospitals
in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley over the past two days.
Daniel Siryoti, Eli Leon, Shlomo Cesana, Danny Brenner, Lilach Shoval, Yoni Hirsch, News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=9843
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
No comments:
Post a Comment