Mike Baker

Israeli defense officials say the assessment is based on recent intelligence, and the timing helps explain how they're interpreting the threat.

According to those officials, Shirav faces credible ongoing pressures that are serious enough to force him to divert resources toward personal security and regime stabilization.

And Israeli officials don't describe the alleged plot as an isolated or opportunistic move.

They view it as a deliberate, broader Iranian effort to disrupt any recalibration that could weaken Tehran's long-standing leverage over Damascus.

Part of Israel's calculation regarding Syria is based on how Israel's defense establishment is now thinking about risk to the Jewish state after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks.

As long as Iran and its proxies remain active across Syria, Israel believes that it cannot afford to scale back its forward military posture along the country's northern front.

Within the defense establishment, the Israel Defense Forces' presence inside Syrian territory is described as a, quote, primary shield, not as a theoretical buffer, a necessary layer of protection for Israeli communities along the border in an environment shaped by Iranian-backed instability.

That logic is translated into concrete policy decisions.

According to reporting by the Israeli outlet Wallah, several high-level discussions in recent months led by Defense Minister Israel Katz culminated in a firm position.

Israel should not withdraw from Syrian territory it currently controls, including the Mount Hermon region.

A senior IDF security source confirms that the army's top leadership has endorsed that stance.

From there, Israeli officials outline how operations inside Syria are structured, and it's worth walking through that framework because it shows just how seriously the threat is being treated.

Government policy divides Israeli activity into three distinct zones, each designed to counter the kind of covert and explicit actions that officials in Jerusalem routinely attribute to Iran and its web of proxies.

The first is the immediate contact zone along the international border, where IDF forces operate closest to Israeli communities, with the explicit aim of preventing cross-border attacks and responding rapidly to emerging threats.

The second is a security belt extending roughly 10 miles into Syrian territory.

This area includes villages and major transportation routes, and Israeli forces focus on preventing the infiltration or entrenchment of terror groups and infrastructure footholds that Iranian-backed actors have repeatedly sought to establish.

The third zone is what officials describe as Israel's, quote, area of influence.

Stretching from Shweta to the outskirts of Damascus, it's treated as effectively demilitarized.

Israeli intelligence closely monitors activity there to prevent the establishment of new military outposts and any proxy developments that would almost certainly point back to Iran.

As a result, Israeli defense officials say the suspected Iranian-backed assassination plot against Shira reinforces a broader assessment they've been making for years, that Iran remains the central destabilizing force in Syria and, of course, the surrounding region.