Israel 'will be at war with Syria sooner or later', says Likud minister

An Israeli minister from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party said this week that Israel “will be at war with Syria sooner or later”.

The remarks came in a series of radio interviews given by Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli on Wednesday and Thursday, in which he outlined what he dubbed a "radical Sunni axis of evil" in the Middle East.

“There is no way that a jihadist regime rooted in Isis and al-Qaeda, whose aspiration is the unification of Jerusalem, can live in peace alongside the State of Israel,” the far-right minister said, referring to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government. 

Speaking to Israel’s Army Radio on Thursday, Chikli outlined what he considers to be a new anti-Israel alliance made up of Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar, which he said worried him far more than Iran and its ceasefire deal with the US.

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