The IDF on Thursday made a surprising announcement that it is continuing some attack missions against Syrian military capabilities and not merely holding onto buffer zones, which it seized in early December when the Assad regime suddenly fell.
In early December, the IDF announced it had massively attacked Syria’s chemical weapons, air force, long-range missiles, navy, and other dangerous items to avoid them falling into the hands of the incoming Syrian regime led by Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham’s Abu Mohammed al-Julani.
However, since then, it has been less public about any moves on the attack, mostly keeping a quiet defensive watch over the new buffer zone with Syria.
Over the last month, the UN, the EU, the US, and others have started to open up new ties with Julani to potentially integrate Syria more deeply into the West’s sphere of influence than Syria had been under Bashar al-Assad.
Top UN and some EU officials have pushed hard to remove all sanctions on Syria as soon as possible and to inject foreign investment and support into the country to help build Julani’s new government and rescue the country from 14 years of civil war and destruction.
However, the US this week has walked a middle-of-the-road line, removing some sanctions on Julani and his allies while leaving some decisions about other sanctions to the incoming Trump administration.
Julani and some of his allies had past ties to al-Qaeda, and although they have claimed to have broken ties with the terror group and have moderated over the years, Israel – along with the US and some Western nations – remains suspicious about whether the new regime will move toward a more democratic and Western direction or eventually revert to its jihadist roots.
It is unclear if the IDF would have taken such additional attack moves and made them public on Thursday if the US had removed all sanctions on Julani and HTS.
More specifically, the IDF said its Division 474 had carried out additional patrols around the buffer zone area it had taken and found an armored Syrian vehicle loaded with significant weapons.
The weapons included anti-tank missiles, improvised explosives, and other items.
Confiscating weapons
At the same time, there are no indications from IDF sources that there are wider ambitions to more broadly attack Syrian military capabilities on the level that occurred in early December.
Rather, IDF sources indicated to The Jerusalem Post that when IDF troops encounter weapons around their buffer zone areas, a safe move is to confiscate them so they do not fall into the hands of potentially threatening actors in a still-chaotic Syria, whether they be the HTS, Hezbollah members, Iranian militias, or Palestinian terror groups.
Meanwhile, the IDF also announced that it struck weapons that were being loaded onto a vehicle inside a Hezbollah military compound in southern Lebanon.
“The IDF is committed to the ceasefire understandings between Israel and Lebanon. The IDF remains deployed in southern Lebanon and will operate against any threat,” said the military.
There remains a lack of clarity about whether Israel will fully withdraw from Lebanon by the end of the 60-day ceasefire on January 26.
On the one hand, the IDF has criticized the Lebanese Army for being too slow in taking up positions in southern Lebanon and in confiscating Hezbollah weapons it finds there.
As such, Israeli officials have hinted that the IDF might stay an additional 30 days or more to guarantee that the Lebanese Army carries out its mandate and to guarantee that Hezbollah does not start slipping back into southern Lebanon.
On the other hand, the US and other international parties involved have criticized Israel for some of its aggressive enforcement actions against Hezbollah at a time when Hezbollah has not fired rockets into Israel, as well as for Israel’s statements about extending its stay in Lebanon beyond the agreed 60 days.
Two UAVs launched from the east were intercepted by Israel Air Force aerial defense systems on Thursday evening, the IDF said. The second was most likely launched from Yemen, the military added.