TEL AVIV – Israel may intervene in Syria in order to prevent Iran or Hezbollah from establishing permanent bases there, former National Security Council head Yaakov Amidror said on Monday.
Amidror’s remarks came a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told journalists that Israel opposes the Syrian ceasefire deal reached by the U.S. and Russia because it perpetuates Iran’s military presence in the country.
Such a deal may force the “IDF to intervene and destroy every attempt to build [permanent Iranian] infrastructure in Syria,” Amidror said, since it gave no consideration to how Israel would defend itself in the event that Iran sets up shop in Syria.
“We will not let the Iranians and Hezbollah be the forces that will win the very brutal war in Syria,” he stated, adding that the next target would be Israel.
“At the end of the day it is our responsibility, not the responsibility of the Americans, or the Russians, to guarantee ourselves, and we will take all the measures that are needed for that,” he said.
He added that “keeping Iran and Syria from building launching pads in Syria” was Israel’s primary goal, and that it had both diplomatic and military means at its disposal to stop that from happening.
Amidror blamed the Iranian nuclear deal for the Islamic Republic’s success, allowing them to build a direct corridor from Tehran to Damascus.
“The ability of the Iranians to do what they are doing now in Syria and Iraq, and be involved in both Syria and Iraq, and their relations with Hezbollah, it is all built on the legitimacy they gained from this [nuclear] agreement,” he said.
He added that the deal allows Iran to covertly or overtly build nuclear weapons and that when the terms of the deal end in a decade and a half, Iran will be able to whatever it wished with them.
“The agreement is the source of all the problems,” he said. “It is even more dangerous than we imagined when signed.”