Israel lifts veil slightly on last month’s airstrike against Syria

Easing a news blackout, Israel acknowledged Tuesday that its air force had struck an unspecified military target deep inside Syria last month.

But the military censor’s office continued to bar Israeli media from disclosing other information about the Sept. 6 raid, including the target, the forces that took part and the degree of the mission’s success.

Everything about the operation, sketchily reported by the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency hours after it happened but then denied by Syrian officials, has been a tightly held secret in Israel. Reports in foreign media quoting unidentified U.S. officials have speculated that Israel attacked a weapons shipment destined for Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon or a nuclear facility built with North Korean technology.

Israeli media were permitted to cite foreign reports of the airstrike, but a special directive prohibited them from disclosing anything learned on their own. The aim was to allow Syrian leaders and their allies to pretend nothing had happened and so avoid pressure to retaliate.

Tuesday’s clearance to report officially that the raid had taken place came from the Israeli censor’s office a day after Syrian President Bashar Assad gave his government’s first official acknowledgment of the airstrike in a televised interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.

Assad said Israeli warplanes attacked “an unused military building.”

That contradicted previous accounts by Syrian officials that Israeli planes had merely intruded into Syrian airspace, met antiaircraft fire and dumped fuel tanks while scrambling back to Israel.

Speaking fluent English and appearing relaxed as he sat with the interviewer in Damascus, the Syrian capital, Assad said the airstrike demonstrated Israel’s “visceral antipathy toward peace” and vowed that Syria would make the Jewish state pay.

“Retaliate doesn’t mean missile for missile and bomb for bomb,” he said. “We have our means to retaliate, maybe politically, maybe in other ways. But we have the right to retaliate in different means.”

Clearly the incident gave Syrians a jolt.

“It’s purely aggressive and very dangerous,” said Mounir Ali, a spokesman for Syria’s Ministry of Information.

While keeping details of the raid secret, Israeli officials have hinted obliquely at possible motives. Gideon Frank, deputy chairman of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, warned delegates at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna last month that Israel could not ignore the efforts of various Middle Eastern countries to develop weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

Syria has denied receiving North Korean nuclear help and shipping arms to Hezbollah. North Korea, which provides missile technology to Syria, has denied giving nuclear assistance.

If the Israelis had struck a nuclear site, “there would have been heavy antiaircraft guns around, soldiers, radiation, scientists,” Ali said. “But they didn’t even kill a goat.”

According to a Western diplomat in Damascus, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem summoned delegates from European embassies days after the raid to hand them photographs purportedly proving that the Israelis had struck nothing.

But the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the photos showed only a fighter aircraft’s empty fuel tanks with Hebrew lettering.

“We didn’t get pictures of the actual target,” the diplomat said.

On Sunday, the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands, a Damascus-based organization funded by the Arab League, rejected a claim by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that the site targeted in the raid was a military research facility. The site pictured in the newspaper is a building used for training agricultural scientists, the organization said.

Syria and Israel have been formally at war since the 1967 Middle East War, during which the Jewish state captured the Golan Heights from the Syrians. Peace talks collapsed in 2000 over the scope of a proposed Israeli pullout from the plateau.

In the BBC interview, which was broadcast in full Tuesday, Assad said Syria would not accept a U.S. invitation to a Middle East peace conference planned for next month unless the agenda included a revival of talks about the Golan Heights.

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boudreaux@latimes.com

daragahi@latimes.com

Boudreaux reported from Jerusalem and Daragahi from Damascus.