BICOM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov arrived in Israel on Monday for talks about Syria.

The Russian delegation met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman and National Security Council Director Meir Ben-Shabbat. According to reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu rebuffed a new Russian offer to keep Iranian forces in Syria 100 kilometres away from the Golan Heights ceasefire line.

The Russians were presented with maps and intelligence that proved the Iranians are building military facilities along Israel’s northern border.

Maariv quotes a senior Israeli political official who said the proposal of 100 kilometres “is acceptable but doesn’t solve the additional threat of long-range missiles”. He claimed that both Russia and Israel agreed “that all long-range Iranian weapons that were aimed at Israel would be removed from Syria”.

He added: “We are operating militarily all the time. We’ve clarified and itemised to the Russians which concrete measures we are taking and against which threats we have acted in the past and against which threats we intend to act in the future.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu reportedly made clear to Foreign Minister Lavrov that Israel would retain its “full freedom of action,” and said that the removal of the Iranian forces from Syria also needed to include the removal of long-range weapons, weapons manufacturing capabilities and air-defence batteries from Syria, and would have to include sealing the border crossings between Syria and Iraq and Lebanon so as to stop arms smuggling.

Maariv argues that the Israeli team decided not to fully reject the Russian proposal outright as it believed pushing the Iranian troops back at the current stage might produce relative calm. Israel, however, is not willing to concede its freedom to operate in Syria in the event that a threat is identified.

Prior to the meeting, Prime Minister Netanyahu told his cabinet ministers that he will reiterate Israel’s position that it expects Syrian President Bashar Assad to honour the 1974 agreement which sets out a demilitarised zone along their shared frontier, and that Israel will continue to act to stop Iran from establishing a permanent military presence in Syria.