Ya’alon: Threat of chemical attack greatly reduced

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said on Monday that the threat of a chemical attack on Israel has been greatly reduced because of international efforts to remove nonconventional weapons from Syria, although he cautioned that the IDF must still be ready to face such a scenario.

Ya’alon made the comments at a school in Rishon Lezion as he reviewed the Home Front Command defense exercise, dubbed Turning Point 15, which started on Sunday.

“The chemical threat to the citizens of Israel is significantly less as a result of the pressure on the Syrian regime,” he said, and assessed that the Syrian army has lost its ability to launch a chemical attack using rockets.

Despite the developments in Syria, “the Israel Defense Forces must continue to be ready to deal with an arena in which there is also likely to be chemical weapons,” Ya’alon cautioned.

Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013 and agreed to destroy its chemical arsenal. That decision averted a threatened US military strike in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds near Damascus on August 21, 2013.

However, last month reports emerged that chemical weapons experts said they had found traces of deadly nerve agents — used to make chemical weapons — at a site in Syria where there were supposedly no materials.

Ya’alon also praised Cypriot authorities on apprehending a 26-year-old Lebanese man who was arrested last week in Cyprus on suspicion of planning to carry out a terrorist attack against Israeli tourists vacationing on the island.

The man, who is also a Canadian national, was found to be in possession of two tons of fertilizers containing ammonium nitrate — a chemical that can be used as an explosive. He was apprehended at his home in Larnaca, in southeast Cyprus.

“It seems they intended to attack us, as, to my regret, they attacked the Israeli tourists in Burgas, and to perhaps carry out attacks against Jewish targets or even Arab entities in Europe,” Ya’alon said, referring to a deadly bombing targeting Israeli tourists in Bulgaria.

The Burgas attack was attributed to Hezbollah, which is backed financially and politically by Iran. Six people were killed in the bombing of July 18, 2012 — five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian citizen.

The annual nationwide emergency drill — simulating an attack on the country — includes a large-scale exercise in evacuating and rehousing civilians caught on the front lines.

According to military assessments, a future conflict with Hezbollah could include a scenario in which the IDF may have to evacuate citizens due to attempts by the terror group to infiltrate and occupy Israeli towns.

It is the first time the country is practicing for such an eventuality in the framework of a drill. It comes in the wake of last summer’s Operation Protective Edge — which exposed a potentially massive threat from Hamas in the form of terror tunnels that infiltrated into Israeli territory — and amid reports of another round of violence with the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which claims to have built a sophisticated tunnel network on Israel’s northern border.

On Tuesday, two rocket sirens will ring out in cities across the country — at 11:05 a.m. and 7:05 p.m. — and people will be asked to rush to bomb shelters in a test of their ability to seek cover in case of rocket attack.

Sirens, however, will not sound near the Gaza Strip after residents, scarred by last summer’s war, asked to be excluded.

The Turning Point drill was first instituted in 2007, following the Second Lebanon War, during which the north of the country was targeted by thousands of Hezbollah rockets, revealing shortcomings in Israel’s official response.

The exercise is meant to be the Home Front Command’s largest annual operation, but in 2014 it was scaled back due to budget cuts.

Associated Press contributed to this report.