JERUSALEM - The Israeli military said it destroyed a machine-gun post in Syria on Sunday after two Israeli patrols came under fire from across the Israeli-Syrian cease-fire line in the Golan Heights, raising the specter of more spillover from Syria’s bloody civil war.
Meanwhile, Syrian opposition leader Moaz al-Khatib, whose offer to hold talks with President Bashar Assad’s regime was resisted by his comrades, resigned as head of the rebel coalition as the Arab League agreed to recognize the group as Syria’s representative.
This was the second cross-border episode of its kind in the past few months and it came two days after President Barack Obama helped patch up the broken relationship between Israel and Turkey, a move that Israeli officials said was largely born of the need to cooperate over the deteriorating situation in neighboring Syria.
After Sunday’s episode, Israel’s newly appointed defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, warned in a statement that “any violation of Israeli sovereignty and fire from the Syrian side will be answered with the silencing of the source of fire.”
He added: “The Syrian regime is responsible for every breach of sovereignty. We will not allow the Syrian army or any other groups to violate Israel’s sovereignty in any way.”
Israel captured part of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that overlooks northern Israel, from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and has since effectively annexed it in a move that has not been internationally recognized. The current disengagement line, established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, has been largely quiet for almost 40 years but is now growing increasingly volatile.
In November, Israeli tanks fired on Syrian artillery units after mortar shells crashed into the Israeli-held territory from Syria.
The military said that on Saturday night an army jeep came under fire from the Syrian side. The vehicle was damaged but none of the passengers was injured. On Sunday morning, another military patrol came under fire, again escaping without injury. Israeli forces fired back at the source, a machine-gun position, destroying it, according to the military.
Israeli news media reports said the post was destroyed by a missile, but the military would not confirm those reports.
The military also did not specify whether the Syrian position belonged to Syrian government forces or rebels.
Israel says it is closely monitoring events in Syria and will not tolerate any transfer of the Syrian army’s chemical weapons or other strategic weapons to Hez-bollah, the Lebanese Shiite organization, and will not allow such weapons to fall into the hands of rebel groups. In late January, Israeli warplanes struck a target inside Syria that U.S. officials said was a convoy carrying sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry that was intended for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
This month, Israel’s chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, said that a string of rebel enclaves on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border were contributing to daily outbursts of fighting there.
On Wednesday, the Israeli military said that some of its soldiers provided medical care to four wounded Syrians who approached the border fence. Two were treated at the scene and two who were more severely wounded were transferred to an Israeli hospital, the military said.
In a separate development early Sunday, 200 Israeli police officers removed about 40 Palestinian protesters from a strategic hillside in the West Bank where they had set up an encampment last week to demonstrate against Israeli settlement policies and what they said was Obama’s bias toward Israel.
The Syrian National Coalition rejected al-Khatib’s resignation, asking him “to go back to his work as the president” of the group, according to a statement it e-mailed late Sunday.
Al-Khatib announced his resignation on his Facebook page. “I announce my resignation from the National Coalition, so that I can work with a freedom that cannot possibly be had in an official institution. I had promised the great Syrian people and promised God that I would resign if matters reached some red lines.”
While rebel fighters, including groups affiliated with al- Qaida in Iraq, have pushed Assad’s army from territory in the north, they have failed to create a united political and military structure in the two years since anti-Assad protests began.
The resignation “showed the divisions that unfortunately continue to affect the Syrian coalition,” Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow in the Arab politics program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in response to e-mailed questions. “There are also divisions between those inside the country and out.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said while on a one-day trip to Baghdad that he was sorry though unsurprised that al- Khatib resigned. “We view this as a continuum, it’s not about one person, it’s about a regime that’s killing its people,” he told reporters, expressing confidence that Assad will eventually negotiate his exit from power.
Al-Khatib, a former Damascus cleric, was appointed head of the National Coalition for Opposition Forces and the Syrian Revolution in November.
Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani said Arab League foreign ministers were in communication with al-Khatib and said he hoped al-Khatib would reconsider his resignation.
Meanwhile, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee called for greater U.S. involvement in Syria through the creation of a safe zone that would allow the U.S. military to train opposition forces attempting to overthrow Assad.
Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan said on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday that he doesn’t want to lure the United States into a “big boots on the-ground conflict.”
However, Rogers said he believes a greater U.S. presence is necessary to prevent chemical and conventional weapons from falling into the hands of anyone who would like to harm the United States if Assad is forced out.
Information for this article was contributed by Isabel Kershner of The New York Times; by Glen Carey, Deema Almashabi, Mohammad Tayseer, Robert Tuttle, Taylan Bilgic and Indira A.R. Lakshmanan of Bloomberg News; and by staff reporters of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/25/2013