‘Syria preparing to lure Israel into war’

By Stan Goodenough
Dec 22, 2006

Israeli media reported Friday that Syria has taken a leaf out of the Hizb’allah war manual and is laying the groundwork to draw Israel into a war of attrition.

According to an exclusive report in The Jerusalem Post, Damascus has been overseeing the building of “death trap” villages along its border with Israel.

Israeli intelligence officials believe that, watching the Hizb’allah at work last July, the Syrians learned some important lessons:

• Surface to surface missiles can immobilize Israel’s population.
• Israel’s state-of-the-art Merkava tanks cannot withstand Russian anti-tank rockets.
• IDF troops are not sufficiently well-trained to quickly win in urban warfare.

Hizb’allah succeeded in preventing the overwhelmingly superior IDF forces from winning the war by:

• Paralyzing Israel’s home front, damaging or destroying more than 6000 homes and businesses, keeping half-a-million tourists from visiting Israel, and dealing a $2.5 billion blow to the Israeli economy;

• Knocking out IDF tanks and troop carriers, forcing Israeli soldiers to enter southern Lebanon villages on foot, where they were met by withering fire.

More than 150 Israeli soldiers lost their lives in that war.

Since a UN-imposed ceasefire last August, Syria has invested large amounts of money preparing to engage the Jewish state in a similar conflict.

Up to now the Israel-Syria frontier has been the quietest of all Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.