Israel held out the prospect on Tuesday of eventual contacts with Syria under President Bashar al-Assad, in a nod to his regime-consolidating advances in a seven-year-old civil war that Israeli officials had initially predicted would topple him, Reuters reports.
Assad’s Russia-backed forces have advanced in southwest Syria and are on course to reach Quneitra, a rebel-held district abutting the Golan Heights frontier with Israel. That has stirred Israeli concern that he may try to deploy troops there in defiance of a 1974 U.N. demilitarization accord on the Golan.
Touring the Golan Heights, Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman ramped up threats to use armed force should Damascus encroach militarily. “Any Syrian soldier who will be in the buffer zone risks his life,” Lieberman told reporters.
However, Lieberman appeared to signal acknowledgment that Assad would regain control of the Syrian side of the Golan.
Asked by a reporter if he anticipated a time when Quneitra crossing would be reopened under the U.N.-monitored armistice between Israel and Syria, and whether the two old enemies could establish “some kind of relationship”, Lieberman said: “I reckon we are a long way from that, but we are not ruling out anything.”
His remarks could foreshadow a more open approach to Assad ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Syria talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday.