Herzog appears to publicly confirm Syria strike
Opposition head boasts he was ‘briefed on the operation,’ in apparent reference to bombing that killed Iranian general
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Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog may have inadvertently delivered a high-level acknowledgment that Israel was responsible for last week’s strike on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights in which top Hezbollah commanders and an Iranian general were killed.
Israel rarely acknowledges responsibility for such attacks, and this was no exception, with military and political leaders keeping mum on the subject.
But last week, speaking to the Ben Gurion University Student Union at the Jezreel Valley College, Herzog, who is briefed on national security matters in his capacity as opposition leader, apparently broke that silence.
Hailing his partnership with fellow Zionist Camp Knesset slate leader Tzipi Livni, Herzog told the assembled students that the pair would bring to the Prime Minister’s Office “immense experience in all fields of life.”
In the videotaped comments, broadcast by Israel’s Channel 10 news on Sunday, Herzog then spoke of his own experience as opposition leader, mentioning the “operation” in Syria as an example of that experience.
“I’m telling you today: Every minute there’s something. What do you think? I was briefed of course on the operation, or on the developments that took place.”
Herzog’s spokespeople backtracked Sunday, telling Channel 10 that the opposition leader was referring to briefings about the aftermath of the attack, and that he had not explicitly acknowledged an Israeli strike in his comments.
Herzog’s comment is not the first unintended admission of an Israeli strike across an enemy border by an Israeli opposition leader. In 2007, shortly after a strike reportedly ordered by the Ehud Olmert government against an under-construction Syrian nuclear reactor, then-opposition leader (and current prime minister) Benjamin Netanyahu made a similar gaffe.
“When the prime minister does things that in my view are important and necessary,” Netanyahu told Channel 1 in September 2007, “to the security of Israel, then I offer support. Here too I was a partner, I have to say, in this from the very beginning, and I supported it.”
The Times of Israel Community.