By Meir Gurno our commentary on military and security matters

A senior Palestinian security source confirmed the news we brought last week, according to which Iran is trying to take control of the Syrian army and gain the ability to maneuver on the ground against the IDF on the northern border. These words of the Palestinian official agree with 3 pieces of news that we brought here in the last few weeks. The first news is the visit of the Chief of Staff of the Syrian Army about a week and a half ago in Tehran. At the end of this meeting, the most senior officer in the Iranian military forces, with whom the Syrian Chief of Staff met, said that Iran will strengthen the Syrian army. The second news item: the words of Iranian President Raisi to President Assad at their meeting in Damascus about two weeks ago, according to which Raisi told Assad that he could no longer take Iran out of Syria with a unilateral decision. These things left such a deep impression on the Syrian president that he alluded to it yesterday in his speech at the Arab League by saying: "This is a historic opportunity to rearrange our affairs, with as little foreign interference as possible." It is clear that Assad did not mention the name of the foreign intervener, but the proximity of these things to his meeting with Raisi, and the sharp words he heard from him according to which the Iranian intervention in Syria no longer depends only on him, as well as the fact that Russia's intervention is now very low, and also that the US has declared that it is in Syria Only for the war against ISIS, it is made clear that Assad's words in his speech at the Arab League are aimed at Iran.

Is Saudi Arabia involved in the Iranian attempt to govern the Syrian army, or is it the one trying to rescue Syria from Iran's stranglehold, as it tries to appear by inviting Syria to the Arab League and Assad to visit Riyadh?

We don't know the answer to that. But if this is a trap that Saudi Arabia sets for Assad, in which it distances itself from responsibility for the fate of his regime, since it invited Assad to the Arab League after 12 years of boycotting him, well if this is the essence of Saudi behavior, i.e., to cover up its involvement in the Iranian plot, It is possible that Egypt also knows about this, since it is hard to believe that Saudi Arabia would take such a far-reaching step without the backing of Egypt. Therefore, in this context, Israel must take this possibility into account, and prepare for ground maneuvers of the Syrian army under the control of Iran.

The third piece of information: Hezbollah's quest to turn Syria into a battleground against Israel, and exempt Lebanon from this role. Here we wrote about Hezbollah's missile and UAV infrastructure near the city of Homs in Syria; to this site in Homs Hezbollah transferred weapons from warehouses in western Damascus; We also assessed that additional such Hezbollah compounds exist in Syria; At the site in Homs, Hezbollah maintains missiles with a medium range of about a thousand kilometers, which cover the entire territory of Israel, probably of the Shahab-3 type; The attack on this site about three weeks ago was attributed to Israel.

An Israeli source said this week that Israel is prepared for war from a distance, and a war on terror, but is not now prepared for large-scale ground maneuvers as in the past. A change in the battle plans of Iran and its allies, especially if Saudi Arabia is indeed involved at least knowing about them, will require the IDF to reorganize, and accordingly to reorganize the IDF's emergency warehouses that are ready for the nature of the war mentioned in the title above and not for ground maneuvers by ground forces. The current quality of the emergency warehouses is higher than their quality on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, from the lessons learned after the war and over the years, but the warehouses are not equipped as mentioned for ground maneuvers and large-scale land maneuvers; The maintenance of these warehouses is no longer in the hands of the army, but in the hands of external bodies, therefore the control over what is done in them, even if it is very strict and supervised by the army, is still not as intimate and agile in changes and adjustments as if the presence of the warehouses were part of the army units. As mentioned, this structure is part of learning lessons, yet in our estimation it should also be examined in light of political and military policy developments, and not only based on learning lessons from the past.