Israel is said to be considering further attacks in Syria and Lebanon following the air strikes on a weapons convoy this week, and on Friday claimed "the entire axis of evil is coming apart".
Israeli artillery soldiers at an army base located on the Israeli-Syrian border in the center of the Golan Heights Photo: EPA
By Phoebe Greenwood, Tel Aviv and Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent
7:57PM GMT 01 Feb 2013
Officials stated the risks of military action to prevent Hizbollah getting sophisticated weapons outweighed the threats of a response from both Syria and Iran.
A third battery of its Iron Dome protective missile system was moved up to the border with Lebanon to prepare for any retaliation from Hizbollah for Israel's reported attack on anti-aircraft missiles being supplied to the militant group by Syria.
Israeli jets resumed flights near the Syrian border yesterday, Lebanese government security officials said, and a well-connect analyst told The Daily Telegraph more cross-border strikes were likely.
Ephraim Kam, deputy director Israeli's Institute of National Security Studies and a retired intelligence colonel, said that the risks posed by Iran-allied militants like Hizbollah and Hamas getting their hands on parts of Syria's arsenal of chemical and advanced weaponry were considered far greater than the threat of retaliation.
"If tomorrow the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) sees the movement of this weaponry, it will and should strike again," he said. "This week's attack was a kind of warning – 'we are ready and prepared to do this'.
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"Syria has warned that it might retaliate. Iran has said that attacking Syria is attacking Iran. But neither will respond. Although we have to be careful not to rule the possibility out all together, the last thing the Syrian regime needs is to enter a war with Israel when it is struggling to survive domestically."
Israel has refused formally or even informally to admit to the attack on the convoy, on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. But its military were upbeat about the consequences, predicting that both Syria and Hizbollah were too weak to carry out their threats.
Major General Eyal Ben Reuven, deputy commander of Israel's northern command, despite the Iron Dome redeployments, said he believed Israel's enemies to its north were toothless.
"I agreed to go on air first of all to tell planning to go up north to enjoy the water and the snow, that they should go and enjoy it," he told Israeli radio. "The likelihood of a response in the short term is very low.
"The Syrians are weak, they are in distress. Hizbollah is in distress. The entire axis of evil is coming apart."
Syrian activists claim that as well as the convoy, a major regime base north-west of Damascus was also hit. Syrian state media said the target was a research centre in Jamraya, which the activists said was in fact a base for "non-conventional weapons".
They reported the raid, apparently separate from that on the convoy, lasted four or five hours, with Syrian air defences proving inadequate to stop it.
There were also unconfirmed reports that Israeli officials notified not just the American government in advance but the Russians, even though Moscow condemned the raid afterwards. Salman Sheikh, an analyst at the Brookings Institute in Qatar, said the Russians were well aware that weapons they supplied to the Syrian regime were being transferred to Hizbollah.
"It's not in their interests to have this spillover," he said. "But I think they are paralysed by what comes next in Syria."
Zalman Shuval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, who was present during recent meetings between the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and America congressmen, said: "The fact that Russia has protested wildly and at the same time privately acquiesced is not unimaginable. On the contrary, it would be exactly the action Russia would take."
In Syria yesterday, activists reported a bombing by the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra militia killed 53 people at a regime military intelligence base in Damascus province.
The leader of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, Moaz al-Khatib, is travelling to a security conference in Munich today (Saturday) along with US vice-president Joe Biden and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Russia denied reports that there would be a four-way meeting between all three and a United Nations representative to thrash out a peace deal based on Mr Khatib's unexpected offer of talks with the regime, made on Wednesday.
That offer was rejected by other members of the coalition, in particular the Syrian National Council and the Muslim Brotherhood. But analysts said it fitted with the Western allies' belief that a negotiated solution to the crisis was preferable to an outright defeat for the regime, so long as President Bashar al-Assad's departure was part of it.
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