Israel admits it bombed Syrian reactor in 2007
JERUSALEM — Israelis awoke early Wednesday to blaring headlines and dramatic video of Israeli warplanes destroying a reactor in Syria that could have produced nuclear weapons fuel, in an audacious covert operation codenamed Outside the Box.
But it was like waking in a time warp. The attack on the reactor, which was supplied to Syria by North Korea, took place more than a decade ago — around 2 a.m. Sept. 6, 2007.
Accounts of the strike appeared long ago in international news media, and former President George W. Bush wrote of it in his memoir published in 2010. But Israel had barred the Israeli media from reporting on it until now, though news organizations had fought for years to have the ban lifted.
The censorship was originally meant to allow Israeli and Syrian deniability, avoiding the kind of blatant humiliation that might push the Syrian leader, President Bashar Assad, into retaliating.
On Wednesday, Israeli news organizations speculated about the reasons for the government to lift its veil of secrecy.
The reversal also prompted a frenzied, if belated, public fight for credit among the main Israeli protagonists in the operation — chiefly between former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his defense minister at the time, Ehud Barak.
The exposure comes amid mounting international tension over the nuclear ambitions of Iran, another foe of Israel, which were supposed to have been contained by a 2015 agreement with the United States and its European allies. President Trump has said that unless the European nations agree to make the deal much stricter, he will back out of it on May 12, renewing suspended sanctions on Tehran.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has criticized the nuclear deal as a historic mistake, and Israel has set off alarms about Iran’s growing influence in Syria, where it is a key ally of Assad in Syria’s seven-year civil war. Under cover of that conflict, Israel has carried out scores of covert strikes against advanced weapons stores and convoys in Syria.
Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the military chief of staff, issued a statement Wednesday warning Israel’s enemies that it “will not allow the establishment of capabilities that threaten Israel’s existence.”