Netanyahu: Israel trusts only itself to protect its borders

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.