Israel lifts blackout and admits Syria strike

ISRAEL lifted its official veil of silence over last month’s strike in Syria yesterday, as army radio said the Jewish state carried out the attack deep inside its arch foe’s territory.

The Israeli military censor lifted a blackout on publishing the information on the September 6 strike, in which Syria had said its air defences fired on Israeli warplanes that dropped ammunition inside its territory.

“The military censor has authorised for the first time the publication of the fact that Israeli combat planes attacked a military target deep inside Syrian territory on September 6,” radio reports said.

“It is the only element the censor allowed to be published,” it added.

Israeli officials have up to now refused to make any comment on the strike and yesterday the army and the prime minister’s office stuck to this line. Amid the blackout, most of the speculation on the raid came from foreign media, with one version saying Israel bombed a suspected nuclear facility that was allegedly being built with the help of North Korea, reports denied by Damascus and Pyongyang.

In an interview aired by the BBC, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad identified the target of the strike as an “unused military building” and said the warplanes had hit “nothing of consequence”.

In the rare interview with a foreign journalist, he said the strike showed Israel’s “visceral antipathy towards peace”.

The BBC quoted him as saying Syria reserved the right to respond.

“Retaliate does not mean missile for missile and bomb for bomb. We have our means to retaliate, maybe politically, maybe in other ways,” he said.

“But if we want to retaliate militarily, this means we’re going to work according to the Israeli agenda, something we don’t look for in the run-up to the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference expected in November,” he said.

Syria has filed a formal complaint with the UN over the strike, which has raised tensions between the two neighbours who remain in an official state of war.

Amid the tension, Israel scrambled fighter planes three times in a week after concerns were raised about activity over Syrian airspace, with all the incidents turning out to be false alarms.

Syrian vice-president Faruq al-Shara said on Saturday that the raid was meant to provide justification for future aggression against his country.

Peace talks between Israel and Syria collapsed in 2000 over disagreements over the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau Israel captured in 1967 and annexed in 1981.