In a blitz reminiscent of the Israel Defense Force’s Six-Day War coup, the IDF is taking advantage of Syria’s power vacuum to obliterate one of the Mideast’s most formidable militaries. 

Since Sunday the IDF has managed to destroy up to 80 percent of all Syrian military assets, according to Israeli assessments. While the operation is mostly designed to keep arms out of the hands of jihadists, it also re-emphasizes the return of Israel’s regional deterrence efforts. 

After the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel appeared to be vulnerable. Arab countries reconsidered their ties with the Jewish state and America, instead moving to repair relations with the Islamic Republic and Russia. In the Mideast, the appearance of strength can buy friends and influence. 

Israel, though, followed up by systematically grinding down Hamas and Hezbollah, and stripping Iran of its air defenses. Those moves were widely responsible for the recent rebel victory in Syria. Now, the IDF is showing that it, rather than President Assad’s patrons at Moscow and Tehran, is the most powerful player in the region.

Built over the course of decades and armed to the teeth with advanced, Russian-made military wares, the Syrian army is no more. In two days following the fall of the house of Assad and the rebel takeover of Damascus, the Israeli air force and navy dismantled Mr. Assad’s military power.

Israel is eliminating “all or almost all of Assad’s air force and navy,” a Mideast historian at Haifa University, Amatzia Bar’am, tells the Sun. Targets, he adds, include chemical arms manufacturing facilities and weapons stockpiles. The IDF is establishing control over the demilitarized zone on the Golan, and has captured the Syrian side of the Hermon mountain. From there it can now monitor Syria’s borders with Iraq and Lebanon.

In some 300 sorties overnight, the Israeli air force struck Syria’s military air fleet, including high-end MiG 23 and 29  fighter jets, and Sukhoy-25 planes. The Israeli navy sank most Syrian warships at the ports of Latakia and Tartous. These ports are crucial for Russia’s naval presence in the Mediterranean and the entire Mideast. On Tuesday, satellite images showed Russian warships retreating from the port. 

Also destroyed was a “scientific institute” near Damascus, which has served as a lab for manufacturing chemical and other weapons of mass destruction, as well as the entire arsenal of ballistic and sea-to-land missiles. Further, S-300 and other antiaircraft batteries have been obliterated, leaving Syrian airspace free of peril for jet fighters, allowing them to fly farther east.       

Israel is keeping a “watchful eye on Tehran,” Mr. Bar’am says. “If the Islamic Republic opts for a nuclear breakthrough, Israel will strike with everything it has, even if it has to go it alone. The hope is that the U.S. will join,” he says. 

“We seek good relations with the new Syrian regime,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said Tuesday. “But if it allows Iran to re-establish itself in Syria, to facilitate transfer of Iranian or any other arms to Hezbollah, or if it attacks us, we will respond forcefully and exact a heavy price. What happened to the previous regime will then happen to this regime.”  

Sources cited by Reuters claimed Tuesday that IDF ground forces are nearing the outskirts of the Syrian capital. Israel quickly denied the claims: “Reports circulating in the media about the alleged advancement of Israeli tanks towards Damascus are false,” an IDF spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, writes on his X account. “IDF troops are stationed within the area of separation, to protect the State of Israel.”

A separation buffer zone on the Golan has been monitored by United Nations peacekeepers since the end of the 1973 Syria-Israel war. When armed militias attempted to take it over Sunday, the IDF rushed to protect the UN troops. It will continue to control the zone “on a temporary basis,” officials say.   

“I ordered the establishment of a sterile protection zone from weapons and terrorist threats in southern Syria,” Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said while touring the Golan Tuesday. He also detailed some of the IDF successes in demolishing Syria’s army since Sunday.   

“Israel is using this short window in time to do what it was unable to do in decades,” a military analyst at Channel 12, Nir Dvori, says. The IDF “is destroying this huge, threatening Syrian military. It would take years to replenish this arsenal, if anyone wants to do that.”

Separately, American B-52 bombers and F-15 fighter jets struck ISIS targets in central Syria Monday. “There should be no doubt — we will not allow ISIS to reconstitute and take advantage of the current situation in Syria,” the Central Command commander, General Maichel Erik Kurilla, said in a statement. 

The UN, meanwhile, is denouncing Israel. “We are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments into Syrian territory. This needs to stop,” the UN special envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, told reporters Tuesday. He declined to address similar American actions.