JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a security briefing Tuesday atop a strategic Syrian mountain inside the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights that Israel seized this month, the defence minister said.
Netanyahu, Defence Minister Israel Katz and the heads of the armed forces and the domestic security agency visited “outposts at the summit of Mount Hermon for the first time since they were seized by the military”, Katz’s office said.
“The summit of Mount Hermon serves as Israel’s eyes for identifying both near and distant threats,” the defence minister said.
Israel PM says ordered military to ‘seize’ Syria buffer zone
Netanyahu’s office said the meeting took place on the “Hermon ridge” and said the premier “reviewed the (army’s) deployment in the area and set guidelines for the future”.
The prime minister ordered Israeli troops to seize the buffer zone as longtime strongman Bashar al-Assad’s rule collapsed in Syria.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said the Israeli move was a violation of 1974 armistice which set up the zone to separate Israeli and Syrian forces on the Golan Heights following the previous year’s Arab-Israeli war.
Israel has framed the move as temporary and defensive, with Netanyahu saying it was in response to a “vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone”.
Israeli forces have also been operating in areas beyond the buffer zone in Syrian-controlled territory, the military has confirmed.
Katz told the meeting of the importance of “completing preparations… for the possibility of a prolonged presence”, the statement said.
He added that the summit of Mount Hermon, home to the world’s highest UN observation post at 2,814 metres (9,232 feet) above sea level, provided “observation and deterrence” against both Hezbollah in Lebanon and rebels in Damascus who “claim to present a moderate front but are affiliated with the most extreme factions”.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the rebel overthrow of Assad, has its roots in Al-Qaeda and remains proscribed as a terrorist organisation by several Western governments and the United Nations.
The group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has distanced himself from that past and attempted to assure Syrians and outsiders that its fighters will respect religious minorities.
Israel first conquered the Golan during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community as a whole.
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