Israel finally admits to strike on Syrian nuclear site in 2007
Israel’s military yesterday finally admitted it was responsible for a 2007 air raid on a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor.
The admission, along with the release of declassified material related to the raid, comes as Israel intensifies its warnings over the presence of Iranian-backed forces in neighbouring Syria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly called for a nuclear deal between world powers and Iran to be changed or eliminated.
US President Donald Trump, who met Mr Netanyahu at the White House this month, has said that the nuclear deal must be fixed by May 12 or America will refuse to ratify it.
An Israeli military spokesman did not respond to questions related to the admission and the release of the documents, including the timing, which could be seen as a warning regarding Iran’s activities.
The declassified material includes footage of the strike and video of a speech by military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot on the operation, as well as pictures of secret army intelligence communiques.
A military statement summarising the operation lays out the case for Israel’s decision to carry out the strike at the desert site in the Deir Ezzor region of eastern Syria, where it said a nuclear reactor was under construction.
It has long been widely assumed that Israel carried out the strike. Syria has always denied it was building a nuclear reactor.
“On the night between September 5 to 6, 2007, Israeli Air Force fighter jets successfully struck and destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor in development,” the Israeli statement says.
“The reactor was close to being completed. The operation successfully removed an emerging existential threat to Israel and to the entire region – Syrian nuclear capabilities.”
Israel’s admission is by no means the first time its military has been identified as the source of the attack.
In 2008, less than a year after the strike, US officials accused Syria of having tried to build a secret nuclear reactor and acknowledged that Israel had destroyed it in the raid.
In 2011, the UN atomic watchdog said that the Syrian site was very likely to have been a nuclear reactor, and that information provided to it suggested that it was being built with North Korean assistance.
Israel said in its new disclosures that secrecy about the strike was necessary owing to the sensitive security situation.
In defending the strike, it noted that ISIL insurgents later overran much of Deir Ezzor during the civil war in Syria, while also saying that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad “in the past used chemical weapons against his own citizens”.
“The nuclear reactor being held by Assad would have had severe strategic implications on the entire Middle East as well as Israel and Syria,” the statement said.
The declassified material provides new details on what is widely known as Operation Orchard.
The material reveals details of the secret operation, about which very few were told, as well as the cover story provided at the time.
Israeli intelligence had picked up on what it determined was the construction of the nuclear reactor and followed its development, it says.
Four F-16s and four F-15s were involved in the strike, with the operation starting at 10.30pm on September 5 and the planes returning at 2.30am the following day.
Grainy footage of the strike included in the material shows the targeting cross-hairs locking on to a building that is destroyed shortly afterwards.
Israel determined that the reactor was “totally disabled, and that the damage done was irreversible”.
Syria and Israel have fought repeated wars since the Jewish state was founded in 1948. The two are still technically at war.
Israel has sought to avoid direct involvement in the Syrian civil war that broke out in 2011 but it acknowledges carrying out dozens of air strikes there to stop what it claims are arms deliveries to Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is fighting alongside the Assad regime, as are Iran and Russia.
Israel has expressed growing concern over what it sees as Iran’s attempts to entrench its military in Syria.
Mr Netanyahu has said that Israel will “never let Iran develop nuclear weapons”.
Lt Gen Eisenkot spoke of the 2007 strike, while referring to a 1981 Israeli raid against a nuclear reactor in Iraq.
“The message from the 2007 reactor attack was that Israel won’t accept the construction of abilities that could constitute an existential threat to the state of Israel,” he said in the video.
“That’s the message from ’81, that’s the message from 2007 and that’s our future message to our enemies.”