Prime Minister Levi Eshkol has warned Syria again that Israel will hold its Government responsible for “every kind of aggression” emanating from Syrian territory.
Addressing the weekly meeting of Israel’s Cabinet, yesterday, Mr. Eshkol clarified a statement made in an interview last week by Gen. Yitzhak Rabin, chief of staff of Israel’s armed forces. Some newspaper reports of that interview, printed in the Israeli army’s weekly Bamachane, had been construed as an attack on Syria’s political regime. “Israel” said the Premier in clarification of Gen. Rabin’s attitude, “does not intervene in the internal matters in other states, as long as they remain on the other side of Israel’s borders.”
Walworth Barbour, United States Ambassador to Israel, asked Israel’s Foreign Ministry this weekend for an explanation of that part of Gen. Rabin’s statement which had been understood in some quarters as threatening reprisals against Syria unless its regime stops encouraging terrorist and sabotage raids from Syrian territory into Israel. In his statement to the Cabinet, Mr. Eshkol said that Gen. Rabin’s statement in Bamachane had not been well interpreted. Mr. Eshkol’s reiteration of Israel’s stand against interference in the internal affairs of other countries was seen here as an additional reply to the American demarche.
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