Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai said they will decide this week whether further troop reinforcements on the Golan Heights are necessary in the face of recent Syrian troop movements in Lebanon and near Mt. Hermon.
While the Israel Defense Force has already beefed up its presence on the Golan to a limited extent, the government is taking care not to exacerbate tensions with Syria.
For this reason, Mordechai canceled a long-scheduled tour of the Hermon region last week for fear that the trip, with its attendant media coverage, would be seen by Syria as provocative.
In pre-Yom Kippur interviews Sunday, Mordechai sought to quell public concern at home over the sudden rise of tensions between Israel and Syria.
He reassured the Israeli public that the army and defense establishment were closely monitoring the situation and had taken the requisite defensive steps, adding that Israel would not be caught by surprise as it had at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Mordechai also said he thought the prospect of war with Syria was “not high.”
Other defense sources said the level of tension had receded in recent days, since the Syrians had not made any further troop movements on either the Lebanon or Golan front.
Those troop movements, involving thousands of Syrian forces in recent weeks, had prompted widespread fears in Israel of a repeat of the war launched by its Arab neighbors at this time 23 years ago.
Israeli officials were meanwhile concerned about troop movements taking place in Egypt.
Netanyahu accused Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak of escalating regional tensions after Egypt held 10 days of military maneuvers.
Mubarak in turn said Israel was overreacting to what he described as routine military exercises.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
