Ehud Barak on Syria Reactor Attack

I have seen some accounts from (George W.) Bush administration officials of Israel’s 2007 strike on the nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. But Ehud Baraks’ account in his 2018 book My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace is the most detailed (only?) account from an Israeli official that I have seen. The tale is basically told on pages 621-23 of the ebook edition that I own. But this is a great summary paragraph:

“We struck just after midnight, in an intricately coordinated air raid that evaded not only a Syrian response, but Syrian notice. The reactor was destroyed. Although even today some details remain subject to Israel’s military secrecy regulations, accounts published abroad in the weeks and months that followed painted an accurate picture. In the aftermath of the strike, Israel deliberately made no public comment. We refused to say whether we’d had anything to do with an attack. As we’d hoped, this gave Syrian president Bashar al-Assad both the space and good reason to deny it had happened—in fact, to deny he’d been trying to make a nuclear weapon—and removed any compelling reason for him to retaliate.”

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