Beirut, March 25: Damascus stands ready if “war is imposed” by Israel as regional tensions rise and hopes for peace fade, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Lebanese television Wednesday.
“We are faced with an enemy that has shown until this day that it understands nothing but the language of force, and it seems that peace in the region is not in the horizon,” Assad said in an interview in Arabic with the pro-Hezbollah Al-Manar television late Wednesday.
His statement came amid heightened tension in the region and concern in Lebanon over recent Israeli military threats against Hezbollah as well as against Syria and Iran.
Assad said the current tension, which he described as a “state of no-war, no-peace,” would inevitably lead to either war or peace.
“Do we have any hope in the Israeli government? No. But we do believe that Israel is left with no choice but peace,” he said.
“But when war is imposed on you, you wage that war irrespective of the balance of power,” he added.
Israel and Syria in 2008 launched Turkish-mediated indirect peace talks which failed at the end of that year when Israel launched a devastating military offensive against Gaza.
Earlier this month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Israel was moving towards again accepting Turkey as a mediator to restart the stalled peace talks.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, which claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
—Agencies