Israel Bolsters Jerusalem, Tel Aviv Security As US Syria Vote Looms

September 9, 2013

3 min read

Iron Dome

And next to him Jehozabad, and with him a hundred and fourscore thousand ready prepared for war. (2 Chronicles 17:18)

Iron Dome
With the United States voting on a Syria strike later today, Israel is preparing for retaliation, moving an Iron Dome to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv over the weekend. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

As the Unite States Congress is slated to vote on a Syria strike later today, Israel is taking no chances with its largest and most sacred cities. According to The Times of Israel, the IDF moved an Iron Dome anti-missile battery to the Jewish State’s largest metropolitan city, Tel Aviv, on Saturday as well as placing one next to its capital, Jerusalem, on Sunday.

According to a Reuters report, a high ranking unnamed Israeli military source has claimed that the United States has promised Israel that they will be notified of any pending action against Syria ahead of time. The unnamed official told Reuters that such a notification will occur “hours” before the US decides to carry out an offensive against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The decision to move the Iron Dome to the holy city of Jerusalem came after a meeting of the IDF’s top officials to reassess the current situation. “The IDF doesn’t provide information about its defensive array,” the army said in a statement. “The missile-defense system is deployed according to updated assessments.”

Sirens sounded in Jerusalem during the November 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza, catching residents of the capital off-guard. It was the first time in over 20 years that air-raid sirens sounded in the capital — since the 1991 Gulf War. No missiles actually landed in the city, but two fell nearby.

Reportedly, Turkey and Jordan has beefed up their security ahead of a potential strike as well, the Times reported.

Meanwhile, as US President Barack Obama seeks approval for a strike at home, his efforts to gain backing abroad continues to falter. Despite a strong push by US Secretary of State John Kerry to get European countries on board, thus far only France has signed off on a US strike, and timidly at that. According to the Jerusalem Post, President François Hollande overruled his Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius’s position that Paris would agree to military action before the release of the UN report on whether toxic agents were used in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21.

Hollande, who sought an accelerated track for military actions, now wants to wait on the report of the UN team, which is expected to be released in a few weeks.

Leading Israeli and international experts weighed in on the EU’s erratic and non-interventionist policies.

“The European fragmented and inconsistent response to the ongoing civil strife in Syria amounts to a moral bankruptcy. That a US Secretary of State has to point out to Europeans that this is a ‘Munich Moment’ is a disgrace to what the European Union ought to stand for,” Tommy Steiner, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, wrote to The Jerusalem Post in an email on Sunday.

Despite all of the precaution and the looming vote, the Jerusalem Post reported that the defense and intelligence establishment continue to believe that there is a “low probability” of a Syrian strike at Israel in retaliation for a US attack, Israeli government officials said.

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