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National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi says that Israel and the Syrian regime are in direct daily contact and are discussing the possibility of normalization, Israel Hayom reports. Hanegbi today confirms comments he made during a classified session of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Sunday, saying “There is direct daily dialogue at all levels between Israel and the regime in Syria. I am leading it with political officials there,” the Hebrew outlet reports. Hanegbi told the committee that Syria and Lebanon are candidates for the Abraham Accords normalization agreements, the paper reports. When asked whether Israel had agreed...

Israel wasted no time after Bashar al-Assad’s fall to bomb all the Syrian military assets it wanted to keep out of the rebels’ hands – striking nearly 500 targets, destroying the navy, and taking out, it claims, 90% of Syria’s known surface-to-air missiles. But it is Israel’s capture of Syria’s highest peak, the Mount Hermon summit, that may prove among the most lasting prizes – though officials have insisted that its occupation is temporary. “This is the highest place in the region, looking upon Lebanon, upon Syria, Israel,” said Efraim Inbar, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security...

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday declared the 1974 agreement creating a UN-patrolled buffer zone between Israel and Syria null and void. In the wake of the fall of the al-Assad regime and the disappearance of Bashar al-Assad, Netanyahu ordered the IDF into the buffer zone. In particular, the IDF took possession of the 9,232-foot Mount Hermon, the highest point in Israel-Lebanon-Syria-Jordan.Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced today that the IDF has seized control of a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone separating the Israeli-occupied and Syrian-controlled Golan Heights.Netanyahu said a 1974 agreement that established the zone of separation between the two...

This is the beginning of something much bigger. It marks a turning point in the covert war Israel and Iran have been fighting for decades. Much has already be written about what happened on Saturday when Israel came very close to all out war with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and Assad’s army in Syria. To understand the seriousness of the situation, one has to look at the broader picture and take into account not only what occurred on Saturday but what happened on the Lebanese front over the past few weeks. The incident on Saturday, when the IAF first...

IDF units on Mount Hermon, which borders Syria, are preparing to encounter Iranian-backed terror attacks, a senior military source told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. According to the source, units operating under the command of the Mount Hermon territorial Brigade have been training to respond to a "combined terror attack" that could involve border bombs, rockets, an attempted kidnapping of soldiers, and possible anti-tank missile fire. "There is someone who gets up every morning and asks, how can I carry out an attack on Israel? Most of the time, they run into great difficulties," the source said. He stressed that...