Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan in Jerusalem on Thursday.
Sullivan’s meeting with Netanyahu comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Jordan on Thursday on his 12th visit to the Mideast since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last year and his first since the weekend ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad that has sparked new fears of instability in the region.
Sullivan, as well as a top military commander traveled to the Mideast as the U.S. and Israel have launched airstrikes to prevent the Islamic State militant group from reconstituting and prevent materiel and suspected chemical weapons stocks from falling into militant hands.
Netanyahu says Israeli forces will remain in a Syrian buffer zone until a new force on the other side of the border can guarantee security.
After the overthrow of Assad, Israeli forces pushed into a buffer zone that had been established after the 1973 Mideast war. The military says it has seized additional strategic points nearby.
Israeli officials have said the move is temporary, but Netanyahu’s conditions could take months or even years to fulfill as Syria charts its post-Assad future, raising the prospect of an open-ended Israeli presence in the country.
Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Thursday that Assad’s overthrow by jihadi rebels created a vacuum on the border.
Meanwhile, Blinken was meeting in Aqaba with Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi on Thursday before traveling to Turkey for talks with Turkish officials on Friday.
Blinken’s meetings will focus largely on Syria but also touch on long-elusive hopes for a deal to end the fighting in Gaza that has devastated the Palestinian territory since October 2023.
U.S. officials say they are not actively reviewing the foreign terrorist organization designation of the main Syrian rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, known as HTS, which was once an al-Qaida affiliate, but stressed they are not barred from speaking to its members.
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