REPORT: Netanyahu warns Syrian combatants not to attack Israel

Israeli leaders have warned against attacks from Syria while visiting a military drill held near the border with the country in the Golan Heights.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon spoke Wednesday, as Israel worries fighting from Syria's civil war could reach its territory.     

Netanyahu said at the drill "Israel is not looking to challenge anybody but nobody will harm Israel." Yaalon said Israel will not tolerate its sovereignty breached.                       

Meanwhile Syrian information minister lashed out at Saudi Arabia, saying Riyadh is responsible for his country's conflict.                 

Omran al-Zoubi says Saudi Arabia is providing weapons and money to "terrorists," the government's term for rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad.          

Damascus has previously blamed Sunni Gulf states for its civil war. Al-Zoubi's remarks came after Riyadh said Syria is facing “foreign invasion” by Assad’s allies.               

His comments were carried by the state-run SANA news agency late Tuesday after Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal discussed the conflict with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Jiddah, condemning Assad for bolstering his army with fighters from Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah group.      

For his part, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on Wednesday urged Qatar's new Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to revise his country's policy of backing Syrian rebel groups.                   

"Hopefully Sheikh Tamim will contemplate the Syrian issue and regarding past policies, he will make a serious revision so we will be able to join hands and tackle the Syrian crisis," said Salehi in a televised news conference in Tehran.                      

In turn, the outgoing US Ambassador Susan Rice said on Tuesday that the United Nations Security Council's failure to take action to stop the conflict in Syria was "a moral and strategic disgrace that history will judge harshly."       

She told reporters at her final news conference before starting her new job as US national security adviser on July 1 that the paralysis of the UN's most important body is "a stain" on the council that she will regret forever, even though she maintained that the US and its allies were not responsible.            

Rice blamed three double vetoes by Russia and China of resolutions aimed at pressuring Syria's President Bashar Assad to end the violence, even though they didn't contain sanctions.         

She expressed hope that the Syrian people will ultimately be able to chart their own future "and certainly the United States is committed to supporting them in those efforts and we will remain so."    

On another note, sources said that Russia evacuated its military staff from Syrian due to the ongoing war in the country.             

This as, US Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged that getting a transitional government set up was a "hard lift."            

Kerry reiterated his called for Iran and the Hezbollah fighters, which are bolstering Assad's forces, to leave Syria a move he said would make it easier for a political resolution to be reached.                 

On the field:                      

Syrian military sources told the Russian-based television network, “Russia Today”, that the Syrian army took full control over the city of Talkalakh in Reef Homs, where it discovered tunnels and weapons caches.                         

On another note, the Britain-based Observatory for human rights said that more than 100,000 people have been killed since the start of Syria's conflict over two years ago.      

The Observatory, which has been tracking the death toll in the conflict through a network of activists in Syria, released its death toll at a time when hopes for a negotiated settlement to end the civil war fade.  

It said it had tallied a total of 100,191 deaths over the 27 months of the conflict, but Observatory chief Rami Abdul-Rahman said he expected the real number was higher as neither side was totally forthcoming about its losses.             

Of the dead, 36,661 are civilians, the group said.


REUTERS/AP/LBCI

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