Israeli forces destroyed the Syrian military fleet in an operation on Monday night as part of a broad campaign to eliminate strategic threats to Israel, defence minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday, during a visit to a naval base in Haifa.
“The IDF (military) has been operating in Syria in recent days to strike and destroy strategic capabilities that threaten the State of Israel. The navy operated last night to destroy the Syrian fleet with great success,” Katz said.
Reuters reports that in a statement he said Israeli forces were establishing themselves in the buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and said he had ordered a “sterile defensive zone” to be created in southern Syria, without a permanent Israeli presence, to prevent any terrorist threat to Israel.
Better do it with the army conducting training exercises nearby then. Appeasement doesn’t work with these kinds of people. They will strike and if conflict is inevitable, might as well push your enemy to meet you on your terms rather than when they’re ready.
Of course i don’t mean striking first, certainly not in this situation. But carrying out defense within one’s borders isn’t exactly something the international community would see as a valid enough cause of provocation for a preemptive strike. Israel is losing support worldwide and cracks are starting to form in their economy.
Imagine if Ukraine had properly built defenses when it was clear Russia was about to attack them, instead of starting to build them 6 months after Russia invaded, hoping they wouldn’t attack. The amount of manpower they would have saved. How many times must history teach the same lesson over and over again. How come we even have armies like the Lebanese army who wouldn’t even defend their own citizens from an invading foreign force just to appease. It just doesn’t seem right to me.