Head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency Yossi Cohen said Monday that Iran and its proxy, the Lebanese Hezbollah party, were planning to move parts of their military bases in southern Syria to the North.
Cohen said "Mossad is detecting a trend" in response to Israeli strikes in Syria and that Iran and Hezbollah "are asking to move some bases to northern Syria, a place that they mistakenly think we will have a harder time reaching."
In recent years, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria that have targeted Iran and Hezbollah, which it calls the biggest threat to its borders.
Iran and Hezbollah are fighting on the side of regime leader Bashar Assad in the Syrian war, and Israel says they are trying to turn Syria into a new front against Israelis.
Speaking at a security conference in Israel, Cohen acknowledged that Israel had carried out several strikes against Iranian targets inside Syria.
In an apparent reference to reported Israeli strikes on Iranian targets in Syria early Monday, he said Israel was not interested in a conflict with its neighbor, reported Israeli media.
He stressed that Israel cannot allow Syria to transform into a logistics base to transport weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel had worked covertly and openly for the past four years to prevent the further entrenchment of forces in Syria.
The Iranians will eventually conclude that their efforts in Syria “are not worth it,” he remarked.
Turning to tensions between Gulf countries, the United States and Iran over a series of recent attacks on oil tankers, oil fields in Saudi Arabia and targets in Baghdad, Cohen said: "I can tell you, with certainty, from the best sources of Israeli and Western intelligence, that Iran is behind the attacks."
“They were approved by the Iranian leadership, and were carried out, at least mostly, by the Revolutionary Guard and their surrogates."
He did not specify which attacks he was referring to nor provide further details on the sources.
Four ships, including three oil tankers, were damaged in sabotage attacks off the coast of the United Arab Emirates in May, while two more tankers, Norwegian and Japanese, came under attack in the Gulf of Oman on June 13.
The United States and Saudi Arabia have blamed Iran, which strongly denies the accusations.
