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‘Syria won’t hesitate to use chemical weapons against Israel,’ says former IDF general

After reports of Israel destroying chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, former IDF general says Assad would have used the weapons against the Jewish State.

By World Israel News Staff

On the heels of reports that the IDF had bombed Syrian stockpiles of chemical weapons in June, a former high-ranking Israeli military official told Hebrew language media that Syria “would not hesitate to use chemical weapons against Israel” in a warfare scenario.

Former Brigadier General Zvika Fogel, who previously oversaw the Golan Heights region bordering Syria, told Radio 104.5 North FM that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would use the weapons against Israel if he needed to do so in order to remain in power.

Arabist Professor Eyal Zisser of Tel Aviv University told Radio 103 FM that the threat of a Syrian chemical weapons attack “did not come out of nowhere,” and that they’d likely had the weapons at their disposal for decades.

“It’s not a doomsday weapon, [but] it’s a guarantee for Assad’s survival,” Zisser said. “Our assumption should be that Assad [for certain], possibly Hezbollah, and definitely Iran have these capabilities.”

Zisser continued by speculating that “the enemy knows what the Holocaust was” and may use gas against Israelis in order to “go all the way” and finish the job of annihilating the world’s Jews.

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However, some critics noted that Israeli fears of a chemical weapons attack stretch back decades and have never come to fruition.

During the 1991 Gulf war, the Israeli government widely distributed gas masks to citizens and warned that a chemical weapons attack by Iraq was imminent.

While the Iraqi government fired numerous ground-to-ground missiles at Israel, several of which struck residential buildings and killed three Israeli civilians in the central city of Ramat Gan, there was never any use of chemical weapons.

However, hysteria over the possibility of a chemical weapon attack led to the deaths of several Israelis, including a baby, as people panicked and incorrectly put on their gas masks, cutting off their own oxygen supplies.

Others died after unnecessarily injecting themselves with the anti-nerve gas drug atropine and suffering adverse reactions.