Damage Control: Israeli Leaders Stress U.S. Pull-out From Syria Will Not Hamper Military Ops Against Iran

Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot described as “significant” the United States’ prospective military withdrawal from Syria but stressed that this would not inhibit the Jewish state from continuing to conduct cross-border missions targeting Iranian assets. “The decision should not be exaggerated,” the top military official contended, adding that “for decades we have dealt with this front alone [and] that’s also how it has been over the past four years during the American and Russian presence [in Syria].” The comments come just days after Jerusalem, along with the American defense establishment and much of the rest of the world, was thrown off-guard by President Donald Trump’s announcement that he will pull-out an estimated 2,000 U.S. troops from the war-torn country. The plan has been widely slammed by analysts that warn the Islamic State has not yet been defeated in the Middle East and that the U.S. withdrawal will decrease the White House’s leverage in its campaign to prevent Tehran’s expansionism and potential nuclearization. For his part, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu suggested that Israel could, in turn, expand its operations in order to uphold its “red lines” of inhibiting the Islamic Republic from establishing a permanent military presence in Syria and from transferring advanced weaponry to its Hizbullah proxy in Lebanon. “I want to reassure the concerned—our cooperation with the United States continues in full force and is carried out in many areas: in the operational, intelligence and other security fields,” Netanyahu asserted. While most Israeli government officials have refrained from publicly criticizing the American move, local television quoted one diplomatic source as saying that, “[President] Trump threw us under the wheels of the semi-truck of the Russian army.”