Communications

Lt. Col. (res.) Stéphane Cohen, head of the OSINT (Open source intelligence) Department at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS)’s Data Analytics Center in Tel Aviv, believes unifying Syria will be a challenge. “For many years, different parties tried to unify Syria, through Ba’athism or Syrian nationalism,” Cohen told JNS. “There are the Kurds on the eastern side...

“It is not a new phenomenon that HTS is trying to present a moderate image. This trend has been seen since 2017 when they severed ties with Al Qaeda,” Carmit Valensi, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), told JNS. ...Valensi provided a more pragmatic reading of the direction HTS is likely to go, saying, “More extremist elements in HTS have...

“The territory guarantees strategic control over the whole southern Syrian arena, which generates an immediate threat to Israel,” Kobi Michael, a researcher at INSS and the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, told The Media Line. “There is no higher vantage point than the Syrian part of the Golan.” Power in Syria is now de-centralized, with the country...

Gallia Lindenstrauss, a senior research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, noted that for now, Israel appears to have no intention of directly challenging Turkey’s influence in Syria. She believes the fall of the Syrian regime could even provide a window of opportunity for Turkey-Israel ties. “Counterintuitively, this is actually a chance for greater...

“There have been numerous attempts throughout the war to smuggle weapons into Israel, mostly from Syria, through the border aimed at reaching Palestinians in the West Bank in order to carry out attacks in Israel,” Dr. Ofir Winter, Senior Researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University, said. “Iran has been trying to undermine the...