| New York Times | - |
JERUSALEM - The Israeli military said Tuesday night that its tanks had fired into Syria in response to shots fired from the Syrian side at an Israeli Army jeep in the Israeli-held Golan Heights, adding that the shells hit their target. Earlier that ...
Israel Says Its Tanks Responded to Shots Fired From Syrian Side
By ISABEL KERSHNER and NICK CUMMING-BRUCE
Published: April 2, 2013
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said Tuesday night that its tanks had fired into Syria
in response to shots fired from the Syrian side at an Israeli Army jeep
in the Israeli-held Golan Heights, adding that the shells hit their
target. Earlier that day, the Israeli military said, a mortar shell from
Syria sailed over the Israeli-Syrian cease-fire line and crashed into
an open field.
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There were no injuries on the Israeli side, but Tuesday’s tank fire
represented the second time in 10 days that Israel had responded to fire
from Syria, a sign of increasing spillover from Syria’s bloody civil
war. On March 24, the Israeli military said it destroyed a Syrian
machine gun post after two Israeli patrols came under fire from across
the decades-old cease-fire line, which is monitored by the United
Nations.
Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, toured the Golan Heights
frontier on Tuesday morning, where he was briefed by the chief of staff
and regional commanders.
Mr. Yaalon said that Israel would not intervene in the Syrian civil war
as long as its own interests were not being harmed, but that it would
strike back at the source of any attack on its territory, whether
intentional or the result of stray fire. It is unclear whether Tuesday’s
attack was intentional.
In Geneva, the United Nations World Food Program
said Tuesday that rising violence in Syria was making it increasingly
difficult to deliver food to millions of people as trucks carrying
relief supplies were increasingly caught in the cross-fire between
warring factions.
The World Food Program reported that it delivered food to close to two
million people in all 14 of Syria’s governorates in March, around
one-third of them in areas controlled by the opposition, and said that
it wanted to expand its aid to reach 2.5 million people this month.
But “it’s becoming more and more difficult with this growing violence to
reach those people who badly need assistance,” an agency spokeswoman,
Elisabeth Byrs, told reporters in Geneva.
Trucks carrying food supplies are being forced to turn back at
checkpoints or when confronted by fighting, and in some instances are
being hijacked by armed groups, Ms. Byrs said. Three trucks with enough
food for 17,000 people were hijacked last month, she said, and although
the vehicles and their drivers were eventually released, the food they
carried was never recovered.
Last month, a mortar shell landed on a World Food Program warehouse in
Adraa, a suburb of Damascus, the Syrian capital, heavily damaging the
food stored there, Ms. Byrs said.
Since the World Food Program started its operation in Syria 16 months
ago, its warehouses and vehicles have been attacked 20 times, the agency
said.
Plans to expand its operations are also constrained by a lack of staff
members. Eight of the agency’s international employees in Damascus were
among the United Nations workers evacuated last week
after mortar shells landed near their hotel, damaging a vehicle; that
left 18 international and 80 national staff members in the country.
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