Syria’s Assad Still Controls Chemical Weapons: Israel
A senior Israeli official said on Saturday that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad retains control of Syria’s reputed chemical weapons and they are not sought by his Hezbollah guerrilla allies in neighbouring Lebanon.
Defence Ministry strategist Amos Gilad spoke after another Israeli official disclosed that Israel had sent warplanes on Friday to attack a Hezbollah-bound missile shipment in Syria, where Assad is battling a more than two-year-old insurgency.
Israel has long made clear it is prepared to resort to force to prevent advanced Syrian weapons reaching Hezbollah or jihadi rebels. In late January, regional sources said Israel destroyed a convoy carrying Syrian anti-aircraft missiles to Hezbollah.
“Syria has large amounts of chemical weaponry and missiles. Everything there is under (Assad government) control,” Gilad said in a speech.
“Hezbollah does not have chemical weaponry. We have ways of knowing. They are not keen to take weaponry like this, preferring systems that can cover all of the country (Israel),” he said.
He was apparently referring to Hezbollah’s conventional ground-to-ground missiles, whose number the Israelis put at around 60,000.
“Chemical weapons kill those who use them,” Gilad added.
The Assad government has hedged on whether it has chemical weapons while saying it would not use such arms against Syrians.
The matter has been subject to intensive international scrutiny since Israel and the United States last month published findings indicating Assad forces had used chemical weapons during the insurgency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
