From the Liveblog of
Monday, December 9, 2024
Netanyahu: Assad’s fall a ‘direct result of the blows we landed on Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
A new chapter opened yesterday in the Middle East with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the outset of a press conference in Jerusalem, his first in 99 days.
He says Israel is defeating its enemies “step by step” in a “war of existence that was imposed upon us,” and cites Assad’s Syria as a “central element of Iran’s axis of evil.”
Netanyahu highlights the billions of dollars Iran invested in keeping Assad in power and the regime’s cruelty against its citizens, noting it “massacred hundreds of thousands of its own people.”
He says Assad’s Syria “fostered hostility and hatred” toward Israel, attacked in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was “a forward post of Iranian terror” and a weapons pipeline from Iran to Hezbollah.
Referencing Israel’s 1967 capture and subsequent annexation of the Golan Heights, Netanyahu says that “today, everyone understands the great importance of our presence there on the Golan, and not on the foothills of the Golan.”
He says Israel’s presence there guarantees its security and sovereignty, and thanks US President-elect Donald Trump for “recognizing Israeli sovereignty” on the Golan in 2019.
“The Golan Heights will forever be an inseparable part of the State of Israel,” he says.
Netanyahu repeats the claim that Assad’s fall is the “direct result of the heavy blows we landed on Hamas, on Hezbollah, and on Iran.”
The Times of Israel Community.