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As Israel’s Anti-Iran Strategy Shifts Into Higher Gear, Worries of Fresh Conflict Grow

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09.15.2019 at 04:11am

As Israel’s Anti-Iran Strategy Shifts Into Higher Gear, Worries of Fresh Conflict Grow by Amberin Zaman – Al-Monitor

Preemptively targeting Iran and its proxies in Syria, or “mowing the grass,” as the Israelis say, remains the centerpiece of the strategy to deny Iran a “land bridge” to its proxies in Lebanon, via Iraq and Syria. Such a route would pose an abiding threat to Israel.

This strategy aims to prevent Hezbollah from adding so-called “smart” precision-guided missiles to its arsenal of rockets, which a senior Israeli official told Al-Monitor number “at least 100,000.” The same source said that, faced with an entrenched Iranian presence in Syria, “it is now out of the question that we leave the Golan Heights to Syria.”

Defense experts argue that Israel’s tactics have proven successful so far. “We have built a system in which we don’t commit errors,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general and former national security adviser to Netanyahu from 2011 to 2013, who continues to advise him on Syria. “The Syrian conflict is not our war. But we have made clear that we have two red lines. That we will not allow Hezbollah and its allies to build bases in the Golan Heights or any new launching pads against Israel,” he told Al-Monitor. “We are bombing Iranian facilities and Iranian rockets in Syria wherever we identify them, and we are preventing Iran from building another war machine in Iraq.”…

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