'Post' reports from inside Syria, CENTCOM lands to observe IDF withdrawal from Lebanon

The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly voted on Wednesday to demand an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and the immediate release of all hostages.

The ceasefire demand in the resolution - adopted with 158 votes in favor - is an escalation by the 193-member General Assembly, which in October last year called for and then - two months later - demanded an immediate humanitarian truce in Gaza.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz that it was important for the United States and Israel to be in close consultation over events unfolding in Syria, the Pentagon said on Wednesday after their call.

"Secretary Austin emphasized the importance of close consultation between the United States and Israel on events in Syria," the Pentagon said in a statement.

Austin told Katz Washington was monitoring developments in Syria and that it backed a peaceful, inclusive political transition, according to the Pentagon.

The Jerusalem Post, on Wednesday, participated in a dramatic visit to an abandoned Syrian base at Tel Kudne in southern Syria, embedded with the IDF, as part of the first Israeli media visit to that country since the 1973-4 Yom Kippur War and armistice.

To the Post’s best knowledge, the last time an affiliated reporter visited Syria, was Abraham Rabinowitz, who visited multiple times between the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1974 armistice.

Standing on the top of Tel Kudne, which was the site of an intense battle during the 1973 War, the Post was able to see nearby the village of Kudne below as well as the village of Jaba, and other Syrian villages and hills deeper into the distance.

Looking to the Israeli side of the border, I was able to see Alonei Habashan and Keshet, which are slightly east of the Gamla National Park and Katzrin in the Golan.

The Pentagon said on Wednesday that there was no evidence that drones that had been spotted over New Jersey were from a foreign entity or adversary and dismissed a claim by a US lawmaker that they were being launched from an Iranian "mothership."

Earlier in the day, Republican Congressman Jeff Van Drew suggested that the drones were being launched from an Iranian "mothership" that was stationed off the East Coast.

"What we’ve uncovered is alarming—drones flying in from the direction of the ocean, possibly linked to a missing Iranian mothership," he said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The Pentagon said there was no Iranian mothership.

"There is no truth to that. There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there's no so-called 'mothership' launching drones towards the United States," Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters.

Israel’s concern that the instability in Syria could spill over into its territory has led it to major action in the neighboring country, essentially opening an additional front in the multi-front war it has been engaged in for fourteen months.

Over the weekend, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took control of the demilitarized buffer zone in Syria that was established as part of a 1974 cease-fire reached between the two hostile countries.

In that buffer zone is Mt. Hermon's highest peak, the highest point on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

“The territory guarantees strategic control over the whole southern Syrian arena, which generates an immediate threat to Israel,” Kobi Michael, a researcher at INSS and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, told The Media Line. “There is no higher vantage point than the Syrian part of the Golan.”

Power in Syria is now de-centralized, with the country fragmented between several groups, most of them extreme Islamist, potentially posing a new array of threats to Israel.