Israel is making preparations to house refugees from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s minority Alawite sect should his government fall, Israel’s military chief told a parliamentary committee today.
“On the day that the regime falls, it is expected to result in a blow to the Alawite sect. We are preparing to take in Alawite refugees on the Golan Heights,” a committee spokesman quoted Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz as saying.
Assad has faced 10 months of popular revolt in which more than 5,000 people have been killed, according to United Nations figures. Israeli officials have said they do not expect his government to last more than a few months.
In a speech today, Assad again blamed the unrest on a foreign conspiracy against Syria.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said last week that Assad “is weakening” and will fall this year.
“In my opinion … he won’t see the end of the year. I don’t think he will even see the middle of this year. It doesn’t matter if it will take six weeks or 12 weeks, he will be toppled and disappear,” Barak said.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.
Israel rarely censured the Assad government for its domestic crackdowns and has said little about the crisis that erupted last March. Successive Israeli governments have sought peace with Assad, seeing his government as a possible anchor for wider Israeli-Arab accommodation.
But in May last year, Israel accused Syria of orchestrating deadly confrontations on the ceasefire line between the two countries as a distraction from Assad’s bloody crackdown.
At least 23 people were killed and scores were wounded when Israeli troops fired on Palestinian protesters who surged against the fortified boundary fence.
The United States, Russia and the United Nations voiced deep concern about the flare-up, but it proved to be brief and was not repeated. Israeli sources note that Assad has not tried since then to turn the Golan into a “second front” in a bid to externalize his crisis.
Although Israel and Syria are technically at war, and Syria is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war of Israel’s foundation, the Golan Heights had long been quiet.
A United Nations force patrols the demarcation line between the Golan Heights and Syria.
Barak said Syrian weapons could be transferred to the militant Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, “something we view with great gravity. Syria is believed to possess chemical weapons.”
The defence minister said that “when central authority weakens (in Damascus) all kinds of factors can create friction to try and act in the Golan Heights, and there are enough bad people in the region.”
