After fall of Assad, PM says Israel is ‘transforming the face of the Middle East’

After fall of Assad, PM says Israel is ‘transforming the face of the Middle East’

Lazar Berman

A new chapter has opened in the Middle East with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday at a press conference in Jerusalem — his first in 99 days.

Speaking to reporters, he claimed Israel was defeating its enemies “step by step” in a “war of existence that was imposed upon us,” and cited Assad’s Syria as a “central element of Iran’s axis of evil.”

On Sunday morning, Syrian rebels took control of Damascus after a two-week lightning offensive, ending 13 years of civil war against the Syrian government and over 50 years of Assad family rule.

Netanyahu highlighted the billions of dollars Iran invested in keeping Assad in power and the regime’s cruelty against its citizens, noting it “massacred hundreds of thousands of its own people.”

Assad’s Syria “fostered hostility and hatred” toward Israel, attacked it in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was “a forward post of Iranian terror” and a weapons pipeline from Iran to Hezbollah, he added.

Referencing Israel’s 1967 capture and subsequent annexation of the Golan Heights, Netanyahu said that “today, everyone understands the great importance of our presence there on the Golan, and not on the foothills of the Golan,” adding that Israel’s hold on the Golan guarantees its security and sovereignty.

The premier also thanked US President-elect Donald Trump for “recognizing Israeli sovereignty” in the Golan in 2019.

“The Golan Heights will forever be an inseparable part of the State of Israel,” he said.

Netanyahu repeated his previous assertion that Assad’s fall was the “direct result of the heavy blows we landed on Hamas, on Hezbollah, and on Iran,” and said that ever since the October 7 attacks, Israel has been working in a “systematic, measured and orderly fashion” to dismantle the Iranian axis.

In Gaza, he said, Israel was now acting “to bring down the remains of Hamas’s military capabilities, and all of Hamas’s governing capabilities,” and to bring back all the hostages.

Israel has been in direct conflict with Iran’s proxies since war erupted last year when Hamas-led terrorists rampaged across southern communities on October 7, 2023, slaughtering some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages to Gaza.

Turning to Lebanon, Netanyahu stressed that slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had been the key link between Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. He was the “axis of the axis — strike him, and you hit the axis severely.”

“The elimination of Nasrallah was a turning point in the collapse of the axis,” he argued, adding that “Nasrallah is no longer with us, and the axis is not what it was.” Israel is “taking it apart step by step.”

Hezbollah began launching cross-border attacks on Israel the day after the Hamas attack last year, firing rockets and drones at border communities and military posts, displacing some 60,000 Israelis from their homes in the country’s north. Nasrallah was killed in late September 2024 by an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, as Israel escalated its campaign against Hezbollah, eventually launching a ground incursion into southern Lebanon.

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