JERUSALEM, Oct 2: Israel lifted its official veil of silence over last month’s strike in Syria on Tuesday as army radio said that 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 Sept 6 strike, in which Syria had said its air defences fired on Israeli warplanes that dropped ammunition deep 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 Sept 6,” the radio said.
“It is the only element that the censor allowed to be published,” it added.
Israeli officials have up to now refused to make any comment on the strike and on Tuesday the army and the prime minister’s office stuck to this line, even after the military censorship was lifted.
Amid the Israeli blackout, most of the speculation on the raid has come from foreign media, with one version saying that Israel bombed a suspected nuclear facility in its northern neighbour that was allegedly being built with the help of North Korea, reports denied by both Damascus and Pyongyang.
In an interview aired by the BBC on Monday, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad identified the target of the strike as an ‘unused military building’ and said that the warplanes had hit ‘nothing of consequence’. In his first public reaction to the strike on northern Syria, the president said in the rare interview with a foreign journalist that it showed Israel’s ‘visceral antipathy towards peace’. The BBC quoted Assad as saying Syria reserved the right to respond to the attack.
“Retaliate does not mean missile for missile and bomb for bomb. We have our means to retaliate, maybe politically, maybe in other ways,” said Assad.
“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.—AFP
