Israel demands “the complete demilitarization of southern Syria” and will not tolerate the deployment of forces of the new Syrian de facto government south of Damascus, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday (Sunday).

“We will not allow forces of the HJT (the Islamist radical faction Hayat Tahrir let Sham, which overthrew President Bashar al-Assad on December 8) or the new Syrian army to enter the zone south of Damascus,” he said during a speech at an officer promotion ceremony in Holon, central Israel.

“We demand the complete demilitarization of southern Syria, including the provinces of Quneitra, Deraa and Swaida,” he added in the speech, which was broadcast live on Israeli television networks.

After the fall of former President Assad, Israel deployed troops in the previously demilitarized zone in the Golan Heights in southwestern Syria, on the borders of the part of the territory Israel had held since the 1967 war and annexed in 1981, at the foot of Mount Hermon.

Israeli armed forces will “remain in the Mount Hermon area and its surroundings indefinitely to protect our communities and to counter any threat,” Netanyahu added in Holon.

Israel, which views the new de facto authorities in Syria with distrust, has launched hundreds of air strikes against Syrian army installations, particularly air defence and even chemical weapons depots, since the fall of the Assad regime, arguing that it did not want that arsenal to fall into the hands of the new authority.

Already, during the Syrian war that began under Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Israel had conducted hundreds of strikes, mostly from the air, against positions of the Syrian army and its allies, above all Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran.