JERUSALEM — Easing a news blackout, Israel acknowledged Tuesday that its air force struck an unspecified military target deep inside Syria in September.
But the military censor’s office continued to bar Israeli media from disclosing other information about the Sept. 6 raid, including the target, the forces that took part and the degree of the mission’s success.
Everything about the operation, sketchily reported by the Syrian News Agency hours after it happened but then denied by Syrian officials, has been a tightly held secret in Israel.
Reports in foreign media quoting unidentified U.S. officials have speculated that Israel attacked a weapons shipment destined for Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon or a nuclear facility built with North Korean technology.
Israeli media were permitted to cite foreign reports about the airstrike, but a special directive prohibited them from disclosing anything they learned on their own. The aim of the policy was to allow Syrian leaders and their allies to pretend that nothing had happened and avoid pressure to retaliate.
Tuesday’s clearance to report officially that the raid had taken place came from the Israeli censor’s office a day after Syrian President Bashar Assad gave his government’s first official acknowledgment of the airstrike in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp.
Assad said Israeli warplanes attacked “an unused military building.” That contradicted accounts by Syrian officials that Israeli planes merely had intruded into Syrian airspace, met anti-aircraft fire and dumped fuel tanks while scrambling back to Israel.
Assad said the airstrike demonstrated Israel’s “visceral antipathy toward peace” and vowed that Syria would make the Jewish state pay.
“We have our means to retaliate, maybe politically, maybe in other ways,” he said. “But we have the right to retaliate in different means.”
Clearly the incident gave the Syrians a jolt.
“It’s purely aggressive and very dangerous,” said Munir Ali, a spokesman for Syria’s Information Ministry.
Syria has denied receiving North Korean nuclear help and shipping weapons to Hezbollah. North Korea, which provides missile technology to Syria, has denied giving any nuclear assistance.
If the Israelis had struck a nuclear site, “there would have been heavy anti aircraft guns around, soldiers, radiation, scientists,” Ali said. “But they didn’t even kill a goat.”
Syria and Israel have been formally at war since the 1967 Middle East War, during which the Jewish state captured the Golan Heights from the Syrians. Peace talks collapsed in 2000.
