03/21/2018
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman praised Israel’s bombing of a nuclear reactor that was being built in northeastern Syria in 2007 after the IDF admitted to being responsible for the action Wednesday morning. Liberman warned the region Israeli might has only expanded since the event.
“The motivation of our enemies increased in recent years, but so did the strength of the IDF. Air Force and intelligence capabilities intensified and expanded [vastly] from the capabilities we had in 2007,” Liberman said. “Everyone in the Middle East would do well to internalize this equation.”
Then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni recalled Wednesday her role in the historic event. This month 11 years ago, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called her home to present her with intelligence about cube-shaped nuclear reactor being built in Syria. A few months later on September 5, Livni, Olmert and then-defense minister Ehud Barak decided military action must be taken.
“Despite the fact that I was foreign minister and in charge of Israel’s diplomacy, the three of us agreed that the military option was preferable,” Livni recalled in an interview to Army Radio.
“Even 11 years later, I remember the moments we sat there with the chief of staff and the commander of the air force in the command pit at the Kirya, listening to reports of the operation’s progress, waiting for our planes to return safely and hoping the people of Israel could continue to sleep peacefully,” she said.
“When I left the pit in the middle of the night after the assault ended and looked at my name in Tel Aviv, I thought maybe the people of Israel would wake up to war without knowing why, but it was clear that it was the right thing to do, and we did everything possible to reduce the risk of a general war.