Tel Aviv - Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak confirmed
Tuesday that Israel has been holding secret contacts with Syria with
a view to resuming peace negotiations.
Barak confirmed Israel had been exchanging messages with Syria via
foreign mediators and said this was done with his knowledge.
'Israel has an interest in removing Syria from the circle of
hostility, and every (Israeli) prime minister, from the right or the
left, of the past 15 years wanted this,' Barak told Israel Radio.
'All the messages are with my and our knowledge,' Barak said.
He did not comment on Turkey's reported role as mediator.
Both Turkish Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad had said separately late last month that
Turkey had been mediating between the two enemy states about a
possible resumption of peace negotiations. Israel had not yet
commented.
Erdogan had been in Damascus late month, reportedly to discuss the
issue.
Al-Assad had told a Qatar-based newspaper almost two weeks go that
Syria and Israel had been exchanging messages through Erdogan since
April 2007.
'Mediation efforts between Damascus and Tel Aviv intensified
mainly after the war on Lebanon in summer 2006,' al-Assad told al-
Watan in the April 24 interview.
Al-Assad also claimed that Erdogan had told him Israel was ready
to withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for peace with Israel.
He said the sides were first trying to find 'common ground'
through the Turkish mediator, but that there would be no secret peace
talks with Israel and that if the talks were revived, they would be
held in public through Turkey's mediation.
Israel captured the Golan from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war.
Peace negotiations between Israel and Syria broke off in 2000,
when Barak, then prime minister on behalf of the centre-left Labour
Party, offered to withdraw from most of the strategic plateau, but
wanted to keep a buffer strip along the Sea of Galilee's eastern
shore, at the foot of the Golan. Syria rejected the offer.
Israeli media have reported that in its messages to Syria, Israel
asked Damascus whether in return for peace, it would be willing to
distance itself from Iran, Lebanon's Shiite militant Hezbollah
movement, and the Palestinian Hamas.
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