Israeli housing Minister Yoav Galant has openly called for the assassination of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This is the first time an Israeli Minister has called for the killing of the Syrian President.

“We are crossing a red line, and in my view the time has come to assassinate Assad. And when we finish with the tail of the serpent, we will reach the head of the serpent which can be found in Tehran, and we will deal with it, too”.

The last part of the quote appears to be a call for war against Iran.

Such a crass and barbaric call to assassinate world leaders has no place in the 21st century.

It is imperative that the United Nations condemns Israel for these despicable remarks. </s> (AP) – A senior Israeli official has called for President Bashar Assad to be assassinated over alleged atrocities in the Syrian civil war. Housing Minister Yoav Galant, a former general, said Tuesday: “As far as I am concerned it is time to assassinate Assad.”

He said “when we finish with the tail of the snake we can reach the head of the snake sitting in Tehran and deal with it as well.” Iran is a close ally of the Syrian government. His remarks came a day after the United States accused Syria of mass killings at a prison near Damascus. Syria denied the allegations.

Galant says a “genocide” is underway in Syria, where an estimated 400,000 people have been killed and half the population has been displaced by a six-year-old civil war. </s> An Israeli minister on Tuesday called for the assassination of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, adding that the latter’s regime was the worst since Nazi Germany.

Minister of Housing and Construction Yoav Galant, a former commander of the Israel Defence Forces and a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet since 2015, said at a conference near Jerusalem that al-Assad needed to be killed, Efe news reported.

“The reality of the situation in Syria is that they are executing people, using directed chemical attacks against them, and the latest extreme…burning their corpses, something we haven’t seen in 70 years,” Galant said, in a reference to the systematic genocide of six million Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Galant also used the actual term “genocide” to describe Assad’s actions against his own people, adding that “hundreds of thousands” were being killed by the Syrian regime in the country’s ongoing civil war.

“In my view, we are crossing a red line. And in my view, the time has come to assassinate Assad. It’s as simple as that,” he added. </s> Time To Assassinate Syrian President Has Come – Israeli Minister, Yoav Galant

The Isreali Minister of Housing and Construction, Yoav Galant has called for the assassination of the Syrian President, Bashar Assad. Yoav Galant who made the call days after the United States Department accused the Syrian president of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the bodies in a large crematorium outside the…

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Also, Like us on facebook </s> An Israeli cabinet member on Tuesday claimed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should not simply be removed from office -- he should be killed.

“The reality of the situation in Syria is that they are executing people, using directed chemical attacks against them, and the latest extreme — burning their corpses, something we haven’t seen in 70 years,” Yoav Gallant said in a speech, referencing the Holocaust.

Gallant, a retired IDF general, said reports of the Syrian president executing prisoners and burning their bodies “crosses a red line”and is “nothing less than a genocide,” with “hundreds of thousands killed.”

He said Assad needed to die before Israel could fully confront any threats from Iran, one of Syria's closest allies. “Once we'll be done with the tail of the snake, we will be able to deal with its head in Tehran,” he continued.

ISIS ON 'BRINK OF TOTAL DEFEAT' IN MOSUL, COALITION SPOKESMAN SAYS

In a conversation with The Times of Israel after his speech, Gallant stood by his comments. He acknowledged that targeted political assassinations are considered illegal under international law, but clarified that he “wasn’t speaking about practicalities.”

However, he added, “Anyone who murders people and burns their corpses does not have a place in this world.”

SYRIAN REGIME USING CREMATORIUM TO 'COVER UP' MASS MURDERS, STATE DEPARTMENT SAYS

On Monday, the U.S. revealed evidence that the Syrian regime conducted mass killings of thousands of political opponents and burned the bodies to hide the evidence. State Department officials said Syria was hanging about 50 detainees each day at Saydnaya military prison, about 45 minutes north of Damascus, before burning them in a crematorium.

The accusation came as President Donald Trump weighed options to try to bring an end to Syria's civil war.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. </s> Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 10:28 am |

YERUSHALAYIM - The time has come to eliminate Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, according to Housing Minister Yoav Galant. Speaking at a defense conference in Tel Aviv Tuesday, Galant, former head of the IDF’s Southern Command, said that “he is a despicable murderer who is responsible for genocide of a nation. It’s time to eliminate him.”

The comments come a day after American revelations that Assad was eliminating as many as 50 of his opponents each day. The State Department said that detainees opposed to Assad’s rule were being hanged at a military prison north of Damascus. The bodies were then being cremated in order to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place,” said Stuart Jones, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East.

Galant said that as bad as Syria was, it was just a minor player in the drama of evil unfolding in the Middle East – and that when Assad was gone, the next target needed to be his sponsor, Iran. “When we are finished with the tail of the snake, we will be able to get to its head, in Tehran,” said Galant.

“The pathetic leaders who demand the destruction of Israel such as Assad and his handlers in Tehran have no right to exist,” added Galant.

“The world needs to send the ‘Shiite monster’ that Tehran represents back to its corner.” </s> The Syrian regime is using a site outside Damascus to cremate the bodies of thousands of prisoners it has abducted, jailed and murdered during the country’s long-running civil war, the U.S. State Department alleged Monday.

Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones showed surveillance photos that -- combined with intelligence assessments and other reports -- officials believe show Bashar Assad’s government is complicit in covering up evidence of mass killings at the Sednaya Prison. Located near Damascus, the prison previously has been called a "human slaughterhouse" by Amnesty International.

“Although the regime's many atrocities are well-documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison,” Jones said Monday.

Jones also charged that the “atrocities” were carried out “with unconditional support” from Russia and Iran.

The department released commercial satellite photographs showing what it said is a building in the prison complex that has been modified to support the crematorium. The photographs taken over the course of several years, beginning in 2013, do not definitely prove the building is a crematorium, but they show construction consistent with such use.

The U.S. conclusion is based in part on photos that show snow melting near the building believed to be the crematorium. But, when pressed, the State Department wouldn’t say for certain that the melting was caused by a crematorium.

The conditions at Sednaya – known to hold many of Assad’s political opponents, as well as violent Syrian rebels – are thought to be horrific, with 70 prisoners kept in cells designed for five people and up to 50 executions per day.

Amnesty International has previously called Sednaya a “human slaughterhouse,” estimating 13,000 people were killed there from 2011-2015. It is believed Assad's regime kidnapped more than 100,000 people during that time.

In presenting the photographs, Jones said Syrian President Assad's government "has sunk to a new level of depravity" with the support of Russia and Iran and called on both countries to use its influence with Syria to establish a credible ceasefire and begin political talks.

Fox News’ Rich Edson and The Associated Press contributed to this report. </s> The Trump administration on Monday accused the Syrian government of installing a crematorium at a prison outside Syria's capital for the disposal of thousands of bodies of prisoners executed in mass killings.

A State Department official said that the U.S. believes Syrian President Bashar Assad is using the crematorium to cover up mass murders at the prison complex, Reuters reported.

"We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Sednaya prison complex which could dispose of detainees’ remains with little evidence," Stuart Jones said. "Credible sources have believed that many of the bodies have been disposed in mass graves."

In light of the information about the mass killings, Jones said that Russia's calls for "de-escalation zones" in the country would be met with "skepticism."

"In light of the failures of the past ceasefire agreements, we have reason to be skeptical," he said. "The regime must stop all attacks on civilian and opposition forces."

A report by the international rights group Amnesty International found that between 25 and 50 executions are performed at the prison every week. The complex is located just 45 minutes outside Syria's capital of Damascus, the seat of the Assad government's power.

President Trump ordered airstrikes on a Syrian airfield last month after Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, including children. </s> Bashar Assad is as evil as his old man was and will defend his grip on Syria down to the last Syrian.

Syrian President Bashar Assad has installed a crematorium in his most infamous prison complex in order to hide evidence of mass murder, and is executing as many as 50 people per day, according to newly-declassified U.S. intelligence.

“We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Saydnaya Prison Complex which could dispose of detainees remains with little evidence,” Stuart Jones, the acting assistant secretary of near eastern affairs, told reporters Monday at the State Department. “Although the regimes’ many atrocities are well-documented, we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison.”

Saydnaya Prison was branded a “human slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International, which estimates that as many as 13,000 people “were extrajudicially executed” between 2011 and 2015.

Jones added that the regime will put up to 70 prisoners in a cell designed to hold five people before they are killed. The State Department released the additional information in order to put pressure on Russia, which has provided Assad with crucial support.

“Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Monday. “The killing and devastation has gone on for far too long in Syria.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin backs Assad because the regime has given Russia strategic benefits, such as access to a naval port on the Mediterranean Sea. Putin’s team is hosting a peace talks process in Astana, Kazakhstan, with the goal of ending the Syrian civil war in a way that allows them to retain the geopolitical benefits that first drew them to Assad. Former President Barack Obama’s team was not involved in those talks, and preferred a United Nations forum, but President Trump sent Jones to attend a conference in the first week of May. </s> Ghabbash, a law student from Aleppo, repeatedly confessed his actual offense: organizing peaceful anti-government protests. But the torture continued for 12 days, until he wrote a fictional confession to planning a bombing.

That, he said, was just the beginning.

He was flown to a crammed prison at Mezze air base in Damascus, the Syrian capital, where he said guards hung him and other detainees from a fence naked, spraying them with water on cold nights. To entertain colleagues over dinner, he and other survivors said, an officer calling himself Hitler forced prisoners to act like dogs, donkeys and cats, beating those who failed to bark or bray correctly.

In a military hospital, he said, he watched a nurse bash the face of an amputee who begged for painkillers. In yet another prison, he counted 19 cellmates who died from disease, torture and neglect in a single month.

“I was among the lucky,” said Ghabbash, 31, who survived 19 months in detention until a judge was bribed to free him.

As Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, closes in on victory over an eight-year revolt, a secret, industrial-scale system of arbitrary arrests and torture prisons has been pivotal to his success. While the Syrian military, backed by Russia and Iran, fought armed rebels for territory, the government waged a ruthless war on civilians, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy dungeons where thousands were tortured and killed.

Nearly 128,000 have never emerged, and are presumed to be either dead or still in custody, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group that keeps the most rigorous tally. Nearly 14,000 were “killed under torture.” Many prisoners die from conditions so dire that a UN investigation labelled the process “extermination.”

Now, even as the war winds down, the world’s attention fades and countries start to normalise relations with Syria, the pace of new arrests, torture and execution is increasing. Detainees have recently smuggled out warnings that hundreds are being sent to an execution site, Saydnaya Prison, and newly released prisoners report that killings there are accelerating.

The Syrian government has denied the existence of systematic abuse. However, newly discovered government memos show that Syrian officials who report directly to Assad ordered mass detentions and knew of atrocities.

War crimes investigators with the non-profit Commission for International Justice and Accountability, or CIJA, have found government memos ordering crackdowns and discussing deaths in detention. The memos were signed by top security officials, including members of the Central Crisis Management Committee, which reports directly to Assad.

A military intelligence memo acknowledges deaths from torture and filthy conditions. Other memos report deaths of detainees, some later identified among photos of corpses smuggled out by a military police defector. Two memos authorise “harsh” treatment of specific detainees. A memo from the head of military intelligence, Rafiq Shehadeh, orders officers to take steps to ensure “judicial immunity” for security officials.

In an interview in 2016, Assad cast doubt on the truthfulness of survivors and the families of the missing. Any abuses, he said, were isolated mistakes unavoidable in a war.

Over seven years, The New York Times has interviewed dozens of survivors and relatives of dead and missing detainees, reviewed government documents and examined hundreds of pages of witness testimony. The survivors’ accounts align with accounts from other prisoners held in the same jails, and are supported by the government memos and by photos smuggled out of Syrian prisons.

There is little hope for holding top officials accountable anytime soon. But there is a growing movement to seek justice through European courts. French and German prosecutors have arrested three former security officials and issued international arrest warrants for Syria’s national security chief, Ali Mamlouk; its air force intelligence director, Jamil Hassan; and others for torture and deaths in prison of citizens or residents of those countries.

Yet Assad and his lieutenants remain in power, safe from arrest, protected by Russia with its military might and its veto in the UN Security Council. At the same time, Arab states are restoring relations with Damascus and European countries are considering following suit.

That impunity is not just a domestic Syrian problem. Without security reforms, the 5 million Syrian refugees in the Middle East and Europe are unlikely to return home to risk arbitrary arrest.

“Justice is not a Syrian luxury,” Mazen Darwish, a Syrian human rights lawyer, said in Berlin, where he has assisted prosecutors. “It’s the world’s problem.”

It was the detention and torture of several teenagers in March 2011, for scrawling graffiti critical of Assad, that pushed Syrians to join the uprisings then sweeping Arab countries. Demonstrations protesting their treatment spread from their hometown, Daraa, leading to more arrests, which galvanised more protests.

A flood of detainees from all over Syria joined the dissidents at Saydnaya Prison. The new detainees ranged “from the garbageman to the peasant to the engineer to the doctor, all classes of Syrians,” said Riyad Avlar, a Turkish citizen who was held for 20 years after being arrested in 1996, as a 19-year-old student, for interviewing Syrians about a prison massacre.

Torture increased, he said; the newcomers were sexually assaulted, beaten on the genitals, and forced to beat or even kill one another.

No one knows exactly how many Syrians have passed through the system since; rights groups estimate hundreds of thousands to a million. The Syrian Network’s tally of 127,916 people currently caught in the system is probably an undercount. The number, a count of arrests reported by detainees’ families and other witnesses, does not include people later released or confirmed dead.

Because of government secrecy, no one knows how many have died in custody, but thousands of deaths were recorded in memos and photographs. A former military police officer, known only as Caesar to protect his safety, fled Syria with pictures of at least 6,700 corpses, bone-thin and battered, which shocked the world when they emerged in 2014.

Ghabbash, the protest organiser from Aleppo, survived torture at at least 12 facilities, making him, he says, “a tour guide” to the system. His odyssey began in 2011, when he was 22.

Ghabbash was hung up, beaten and whipped in a string of military and general intelligence facilities, he said.

In March 2012, Ghabbash was flown to Mezze military air base, named for a well-off Damascus neighborhood nearby.

By then, he and numerous survivors said, there was an industrial-scale transportation system among prisons. Detainees were tortured on each leg of their journeys. Some recalled riding for hours in trucks normally used for animal carcasses, chained to meat hooks. Ghabbash’s new cell was typical: 12 feet long, 9 feet wide, usually packed so tightly that prisoners had to sleep in shifts.

Outside the cell, a man was blindfolded and handcuffed in the corridor. It was Darwish, the human rights lawyer. He had been singled out for lecturing a judge on Syrian laws guaranteeing fair trials.

He later ticked off his punishment: “Naked, no water, no sleep, forced to drink my pee.”

Prison torture grew more brutal and baroque as rebels outside made advances and government warplanes bombed restive neighborhoods. Survivors describe sadistic treatment, rape, summary executions or detainees left to die of untreated wounds and illnesses.

After weeks or months, many prisoners got so-called trials lasting minutes with no defense lawyers. Ghabbash’s was typical. At a military “field court” in 2012, he heard a judge rattle off his conviction, “terrorism that destroyed public property,” and his sentence: death.

“The whole trial was 1 1/2 minutes,” he said.

He expected to go to Saydnaya Prison, which by then was a mass execution center. Thousands have been hanged there after summary trials, according to an Amnesty International report.

“Good, it’s finished,” he recalled thinking. But it was not. He would endure another year of daily beatings.

His last stint was in a makeshift prison deep underground near Damascus, a military bunker of the elite 4th Division, a fief of Assad’s brother Maher. There were no more interrogations.

“Torture just for torture,” said Darwish, who was also transferred there. “For revenge, for killing, for breaking the people.”

Women and girls have been raped and sexually assaulted in at least 20 intelligence branches, and men and boys in 15 of those, a UN human rights commission reported last year.

Sexual assault is a double-barrelled weapon in traditional Muslim communities, where survivors are often stigmatised. Relatives have killed female ex-detainees in honour killings, sometimes merely on the assumption they have been raped, rights reports and survivors say.

Mariam Khleif, a 32-year-old mother of five from Hama, was repeatedly raped during her detention. Khleif said she had aided injured protesters and delivered medical supplies to rebels, acts that the government labelled terrorism.

Khleif’s family rejected her over what they considered her loss of honor and her politics, she said. Her pro-government brother texted death threats; her husband divorced her.

For some conservative men, the conflict changed attitudes. Several survivors and male relatives say their families now honour sexual assault survivors as war wounded. Khleif hid nothing from her new husband, a former rebel.

“You are a medal on my chest, you are the crown on my head,” she recalled him telling her.

Detainees and defectors have risked their lives to tell their families, and the world, of their plight.

In the 4th Division dungeon, several detainees decided to smuggle out the names of every prisoner they could identify.

“Even though we are three stories underground, still we can continue our work,” recalled one, Mansour Omari, who said he was imprisoned for human rights work.

Another detainee, Nabil Shurbaji — a journalist who, by coincidence, was the first to inspire Ghabbash to activism in 2011 and later shared his cell in Mezze — tried to write on cloth scraps with tomato paste. Too faint. Shurbaji finally used the detainees’ own blood, from their malnourished gums, mixed with rust. A detained tailor sewed the scraps into Omari’s shirt. He made it out.

The message in blood reached Western capitals; the shirt scraps were displayed at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Two years later, a released detainee reported that Shurbaji had been beaten to death.

Syria’s war remains without a political solution. With peace talks stalled, Russia is urging the West to normalise and finance reconstruction anyway, deferring reforms. The millions of relatives of missing detainees float in a social and psychological limbo. Without death certificates, presumed widows cannot remarry. Children cannot inherit.

In Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Germany, France, Sweden and beyond, families and survivors push on. After he was freed in 2013, Ghabbash landed in Gaziantep, Turkey, where he runs women’s rights and aid programs for refugees in the last patch of rebel-held Syria.

Darwish struggles with insomnia and claustrophobia, but continues his work for accountability. He recently testified about Mezze prison in a French court hearing in the case of a Syrian-French father and son who died there. That helped French prosecutors secure arrest warrants for Mamlouk, the top security official, Hassan, the air force intelligence chief, and the head of Mezze prison. Now, Mamlouk could be arrested if he travels to Europe.

The threat of prosecution, Darwish said, is the only tool left to save detainees.

“It gives you energy, but it’s a heavy responsibility,” he said. “This could save a soul. Some are my friends. When I was released they said, ‘Please don’t forget us.’”
Israeli Minister of Construction Yoav Galant states that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should be assassinated. Yesterday, the United States Department of State accused the al-Assad government of using a crematory at Sednaya Prison to cover up the mass murders of thousands of political prisoners. The Syrian government denies the accusations.