BICOM

Israel’s defence minister toured Israel’s northern border yesterday for the first time since taking office last week and said that his priority is simply to maintain calm.

During the past week, Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman has looked to assuage the concerns of critics who point to his lack of military experience and perceived hard line position on a variety of issues. Yesterday, during a tour of the northern border alongside IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot and senior commanders, Lieberman said:“We don’t have other plans beyond maintaining the calm situation.”

However, he also cautioned:“I hope that everybody understands this well, also our neighbours. In any event, I don’t recommend that anybody try and test us.”

Israel faces the continuing threat of violence from the terrorist group Hezbollah, which is based in southern Lebanon and has amassed a significant military force aimed at Israel. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Syria, other Islamist terror elements have threatened to open a front on Israel’s border, capitalising on the chaos of the country’s civil war. At the end of his tour, Lieberman said: “Our northern border is in good and safe hands. I was impressed by the assessments, the preparedness and the plans. The job of the IDF is to protect the security and the calm on the northern border, and that is what we are doing.”

Meanwhile, the Syrian website Zaman Al Wasl has claimed that Israel carried out an air strike earlier this week against a Hezbollah weapons cache near the Syrian city of Homs. There has been no response from Israeli officials. In December, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted publicly for the first time that air strikes had taken place in Syria to prevent advanced weapons from reaching Hezbollah.

Lieberman was appointed after a protracted period of political drama, in which unity government talks between Netanyahu and opposition leader Isaac Herzog collapsed, and former-Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon resigned from the Knesset entirely.