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Report: Iran Thinks Israel is Close to Striking It – Middle East – News – Israel National News.

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Iran believes that Israel is close to stiking its nuclear facilities, according to a report in Lebanese newspaper Al Jumhuriya, cited by Maariv/NRG. According to the report, a senior Iranian official recently visited Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in his hideout in the Dahiya section section of Beirut to discuss this assessment.

A senior military source confirmed to the Lebanese newspaper that the meeting had, indeed, taken place, but said it had not been held inside the Dahiya – a neighborhood controlled by Hezbollah – but outside it.

The senior source said that the Iranian official is a military officer and that the meeting was devoted to the military and logistical readiness of Hezbollah for a confrontation with Israel, which, he added, is just “a stone’s throw away” from Lebanon.

The source added that less than 48 hours after the meeting, 10,000 Hezbollah guerillas and unspecified “special forces” began extensive military exercises in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley. He said that 10,000 men took part in the exercises, which were the largest of their kind ever conducted in that area. He added that strengthening Hezbollah in the region is also intended to enable the continued flow of weapons from Damascus to the organization, and especially advanced weaponry.

The report could be an effort at disinformation and is probably meant to intimidate Israel and hint that Hezbollah – an Iranian proxy force – would fire its missiles at the Jewish state if it attacks Iran. Hezbollah has reportedly promised Lebanon’s president, Michel Ayoun, that it would refrain from attacking Israel from Lebanese territory if Israel attacks Syria. It subsequently warned, however, that it would attack Israel from Syrian territory, if Israel strikes Syria.

Iran has an extensive program for developing nuclear weapons which is deemed to be close to the point at which a weapon can be manufactured. Israel’s leadership sees this as an existential threat and has vowed numerous times to stop the program by whatever means necessary. However, it has refrained from taking action thus far in the hope that the United States would be the one to force Iran to halt the program – with force, if need be.

US President Barack Obama’s hesitation to launch even a minor strike on Iran’s ally, Syria, even after it crossed Obama’s self-announced red line and used chemical weapons to massacre civilians, is causing many Israelis to reconsider any faith they had that Obama would take action against the much larger Iranian threat.

Damascus, Hizballah jack up threats on Israel in absence of Obama-Netanyahu coordination on Syria.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz

Notwithstanding unconfirmed claims by officials in Jerusalem, US President Barack Obama did not forewarn Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu about his decision Saturday, Aug. 31, to abort the imminent military strike on Syria and turn the decision over to Congress. This is reported by debkafile’s intelligence and Washington sources. Neither did the US president offer Netanyahu any assurances that Syria was not Iran and the US president stood by his commitments on Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
Monday, Sept. 9, in the wake of the soft soap pouring out of Jerusalem, senior IDF circles were concerned by the unrealistic mood of the country on the eve of the New Year festival as though Israel and the US were fully coordinated on Syria and Hizballah and the danger of Syria repeating its chemical attack – this time on Israel – could be discounted.

The officers explained that the former close cooperation between US and Israel military chiefs was no longer a factor.
“It should be understood,” said a high-ranking source, “that the brakes applied suddenly Saturday night on a ready-to-go US strike against Syria was a watershed event in US-Israeli military relations and a game-changer for the Middle East at large”
President Obama’s shock action, at the very moment that four regional armies of Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, were all at peak tension for the attack to begin, will leave a lasting scar on the region for years to come. The finger was about to pull the trigger when it was yanked off.”
Informed Israeli sources found confirmation for their concern in an article published in the Atlantic Council of Sept. 1 by Fred Hof, a close observer of the Bashar Assad persona and a veteran shaper of US policy on Syria.

He wrote: “The events of the past ten days suggest that there was no administration forethought to the possibility of a major chemical incident in Syria; there was no plan in place to respond to a major chemical attack by the regime.”

This view was echoed by the two Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham after they met the president Monday. They saw no coherent, “sustainable”  plan of action against Assad other than a few missile strikes.

Those Israel sources found those impressions especially disquieting, coming as they did after nearly two years in which the US, Israel and Jordan had worked closely to prepare for the contingency of a large-scale chemical attack by the Assad regime.

During that time, Israel was persuaded by Washington to ignore 14 limited poison gas attacks in the outgoing year and suppress the information. But after the massive attack of Aug. 21 on the eastern outskirts of Damascus and the deaths of more than 1,400 Syrians, Israel is no longer willing to look away from the threat to its own national security just 100 kilometers away  – especially since the Obama administration turned his back on the contingency plans prepared jointly for this event.

Monday, Sept. 2, a French government official cited an intelligence report showing there had been “massive use of chemical agents” in the attack coming on Aug. 21 from government-controlled areas “at a level of sophistication that can only belong to the regime.”

debkafile’s Israeli sources add that since Obama stalled the US attack on Syria Saturday, the threats from Syria and Hizballah to attack Israel have gained momentum. They focus on the weeks taken up by congressional deliberations on US action.  Those threats were at the front of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s mind Monday, when he phrased his New Year greeting to the country: “If anyone is contemplating harming us during the festival, he should know what awaits him,” he said.

IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz emphasized in his holiday message that Israel’s armed forces can be counted on to guard the nation against any danger.

This struck a quite different note from the anodyne assurances of close cooperation with Washington against the Syrian peril coming from his office earlier. It sounded more as though the prime minister had reason to believe that Israel and the IDF would very soon be called upon to ward off a fast-approaching peril.
Israel is not the only object of Syrian threats. In an interview published Monday by the French Le Figaro, Bashar Assad warned France it will be “an enemy of Syria” if it takes part in military intervention. Foreign military action could ignite a wider regional conflict, said the Syrian ruler. “Everyone will lose control of the situation when the powder keg explodes. Chaos and extremism will spread.”

Israel fears being left alone to counter Iran nuclear programme – FT.com.

Israel ‘uneasy’ being painted by Obama as potential WMD victim | The Times of Israel.

‘We don’t need America to take care of threats to Israel,’ officials quoted as saying. President said to have assured PM he remains determined to stop Iran going nuclear

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry (photo credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Israel’s leaders are reportedly unhappy that President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are citing concern over Israel being hit by Syrian chemical weapons as a means to galvanize Congressional support for a strike against President Bashar Assad’s regime.

Israel is “discomfited that both Obama and Kerry mentioned Israel as a potential victim of Assad’s chemical weapons,” Israel’s Channel 2 news reported Monday night. Israel, it quoted unnamed senior Israeli officials saying, “is not a victim. We don’t need America to take care of threats to Israel.”

Israel’s army, the sources said, was perfectly capable of protecting Israel from any dangers posed by Assad.

Furthermore, if the United States did go ahead and strike at Assad, for using chemical weapons to kill 1,429 Syrians in what Kerry said Friday was a carefully planned attack on August 21, Israel would regard itself as having full “freedom of action” to respond as it saw fit, the TV report said.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he sees a low probability of Assad retaliating against Israel for any US strike, and has warned that any Syrian attack would be met with forceful response.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu urged Israelis to enjoy the forthcoming High Holidays — Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) starts on Wednesday night — and warned, “If anyone thinks of disturbing the tranquility of the festival, he should know what’s in store for him.”

During his Rose Garden remarks on Saturday, Obama called the August 21 attack “an assault on human dignity… It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria’s borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons…”

Kerry, a day earlier, bracketing Assad with Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein in making an urgent case for military intervention, said “our choice today has great consequences… It matters to our security and the security of our allies. It matters to Israel.”

In a telephone call on Saturday, some four hours before he surprisingly announced that he would seek Congressional authorization before a strike on Syria, Obama reportedly telephoned Netanyahu to give him advance warning of his change of heart. Obama told Netanyahu in that conversation that his stance on Syria had “no negative implications” for his policies aimed at thwarting Iran’s nuclear drive, Channel 2 further reported, quoting the president as saying to Netanyahu, “I remain determined to prevent Iran going nuclear.”

Privately, Israeli leaders are said to be worried that Iran will read the delay in a US-led strike on Assad as an indication of American hesitancy and weakness, with potential implications for the Islamic Republic’s drive to a nuclear weapons capability. Netanyahu has ordered his ministers to stay silent on the issue of Obama’s change of heart, but a former Israeli national security adviser, Giora Eiland, said flatly in a radio interview Monday that he considered the Obama shift to be “a mistake” — and noted that it gave Assad further leeway to keep killing the civilians that an American response would be designed to protect.

Channel 2 quoted unnamed senior American sources as saying that tackling Syria was “complex” but “marginal from a strategic point of view.” They reportedly said Obama was concerned not to get the US drawn into the Syrian civil war, but that the president was adamant that Assad’s use of chemical weapons would not be allowed to pass without the appropriate response.

The American sources said Obama was telling members of Congress, as he sought to persuade them to authorize a strike, that America’s deterrent capability vis-a-vis Syria, Hezbollah and Iran would be damaged were it not to take military action against Assad. Anyone worried by Iran’s nuclear program should support hitting Assad, the sources said Obama was telling members of Congress.

The TV report said the White House was hoping that the powerful pro-Israel lobby AIPAC would help win Congressional support for Obama to strike at Syria.

Obama courts Senate opponents of Syria strike | JPost | Israel News.

WASHINGTON – US President Barack Obama met with members of the Senate leadership on Monday at the White House, as the question of whether the United States should attack Syria moved to Capitol Hill.

After surprising Congress with the decision to seek authorization for the use of force in order to punish Syria’s nominal president, Bashar Assad, for using chemical weapons against his own people on August 21, Obama administration officials scrambled to court votes from lawmakers voicing deep skepticism over military intervention.

Following a classified briefing, members of Congress from both parties said the administration’s case for Assad’s culpability was thin, that the scope of the operation was undefined and that the specter of the Iraq War cast a dark shadow over the prospect of intervention.

However, the chairmen of the committees on Foreign Relations, Intelligence and Armed Services, as well as the Senate majority leader, have all expressed support over the weekend, indicating that the upper house would ultimately vote in favor of authorization.

Obama met with several key lawmakers on Monday, including his former political rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), who has been a leading congressional voice on Syria for several months.

McCain said on Monday that a vote by the US Congress against Obama’s proposal for using military force in Syria would be catastrophic.

“If the Congress were to reject a resolution like this after the president of the United States has already committed to action, the consequences would be catastrophic,” McCain told reporters after meeting with the president at the White House. McCain said he was encouraged by the meeting but that there was “a long way to go” to get the resolution passed.

McCain said that he and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham – who was also in the meeting with Obama – favored changes in the resolution that would broaden it to make it more than just a response to the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government.

“We do want an articulation of a goal that over time will degrade Bashar Assad’s capabilities, increase and upgrade the capabilities of the Free Syrian Army and the Free Syrian Government so they can increase the momentum on the battlefield,” McCain said.

Both McCain and Graham have long favored US intervention against Assad in the civil war in Syria, while Democrat Obama has tried to stay out of the conflict until now.

“We appreciate the president meeting with us. We had a candid exchange of views and I think we have found some areas that we can work together. But we have a long way to go,” McCain said.

Secretary of State John Kerry, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will testify before the Senate on Tuesday at an emergency hearing on the Syrian crisis, where they will reinforce the case that the use of chemical weapons in this century cannot go unpunished.

The House of Representatives will hold its own hearing on Wednesday. Senior administration officials, in addition to Kerry, spent over an hour on the phone with House Democrats on Monday in an attempt to secure their votes.

The president leaves Tuesday night for Sweden and will travel from there to Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he will face pushback from his host, President Vladimir Putin, for considering a strike.

Russia’s foreign minister said Monday that his government was not convinced by American evidence that Assad’s forces were culpable in the August 21 chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus.

Members of the Russian parliament are considering a trip to Washington in order to lobby their American counterparts against a strike.

“I think if we manage to establish a dialogue with our partners in the US Congress…we could possibly better understand each other, and we hope that the US Congress will occupy a balanced position in the end and, without strong arguments in place… will not support the proposal on use of force in Syria,” Russian Speaker of the Upper House Valentina Matviyenko said.

Nevertheless, warship movements continued Monday throughout the political deliberations. Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that the Kremlin had sent a spy ship to the Mediterranean, joining two battleships that were sent last week to counter an allied military buildup of eight warships near Syria’s coast.

The US on Sunday night also ordered an aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, to reroute to the Red Sea, though its orders were not characterized as part of a buildup toward a Syrian campaign.

In Paris, senior members of France’s ruling party rebuffed growing calls from the opposition for a parliamentary vote on whether to take military action, after the legislatures in Britain and the US were given the chance to weigh in on their country’s involvement.

French President Francois Hollande is the army’s commander- in-chief under the French constitution, and is empowered to order an intervention.

His sole obligation is to inform parliament within three days of the start of action.

In an interview with a French newspaper, Assad warned Paris against acting in concert with the US.

“Anybody who contributes to the financial and military reinforcement of terrorists is the enemy of the Syrian people. If the policies of the French state are hostile to the Syrian people, the state will be their enemy,” Assad said.

“There will be repercussions, negative ones obviously, on French interests.”

Meeting in Cairo, the Arab League passed a resolution by Saudi Arabia urging the United Nations and the international community to “take the deterrent and necessary measures against the culprits of this crime that the Syrian regime bears responsibility for.”

Blaming Assad for the attack, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal pushed the Arab League for the toughest language possible that would underline its support for an American strike.

“Any opposition to any international action would only encourage Damascus to move forward with committing its crimes and using all weapons of mass destruction,” Faisal said.

“The time has come to call on the world community to bear its responsibility and take the deterrent measure that puts a halt to the tragedy.”

Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria declined to support the resolution.

Reuters contributed to this report