Israel strikes suspected Syria chemical weapon sites
Israel has confirmed it is carrying out air strikes on Syria to target suspected chemical weapons and missile sites.
Gideon Saar, the country’s foreign minister, said this was to stop weapons falling “into the hands of extremists”, following the overthrow of the Assad regime.
Media reports suggest there have been dozens of Israeli air strikes in the past two days, including on a site in Damascus said to have been used for rocket development by Iranian scientists.
The Israeli air strikes come as the UN’s chemical watchdog warns authorities in Syria to ensure that suspected stockpiles of chemical weapons are safe.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, said on Monday that the Israeli military had conducted overnight strikes on multiple locations spanning coastal and southern Syria.
“Since the initial hours after the announcement of the fall of the former regime, Israel began launching intensive air strikes, deliberately destroying weapons and ammunitions depots,” it said.
According to the UN’s chemical watchdog, the organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a chemical weapon is a chemical used to cause intentional death or harm through its toxic properties, external.
The use of chemical weapons is prohibited under international humanitarian law regardless of the presence of a valid military target, as the effects of such weapons are indiscriminate by nature.
It is not known where or how many chemical weapons Syria has, but former President Bashar al-Assad is believed to have kept stockpiles and that the declaration he had made was incomplete.
Syria signed the OPCW’s Chemical Weapons Certificate in 2013, a month after a chemical weapons attack on suburbs of the capital, Damascus, that involved the nerve agent sarin and left more than 1,400 people dead.
The horrific pictures of victims convulsing in agony shocked the world. Western powers said the attack could only have been carried out by the government, but Assad blamed the opposition.
Despite the OPCW and the UN destroying all 1,300 tonnes of chemicals that the Syrian government declared, chemical weapons attacks in the country still continued.
On Monday, the OPCW said it had contacted Syria “with a view to emphasising the paramount importance of ensuring the safety and security of all chemical weapons related materials and facilities” in the country.
Also on Monday, the Israeli military released photos of its troops who crossed from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights into the demilitarised buffer zone in Syria where UN peacekeepers are based.
The Golan Heights is a rocky plateau about 60km (40 miles) south-west of Damascus.
Israel seized the Golan from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed it in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so unilaterally in 2019.
Speaking at a news conference on Monday, Saar said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was only making “a very limited and temporary step” taken for “security reasons”.
-BBC