Envoy says Israel did not give the US notice before strikes on Syrian base

Tom Barrack, the United States ambassador to Turkiye and its special envoy to Syria, has accused Israel of offering no warning before carrying out military strikes in Syria this week, though Israeli officials insisted it did.

Barrack , who called the Israeli strikes an “unnecessary escalation”, said in an interview on Friday that the attacks on the Abu Duhur military base in northern Syria may have been aimed at “baiting the Turks”, who have substantial influence in the region.

Israeli officials, who have warned Turkiye against supplementing its military presence in Syria , angrily denounced the comments from Barrack.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a social media post on Saturday that Israel had shared “intelligence information to the authorised parties in the United States” prior to the strike on Tuesday.

Israel has stepped up threats against Turkiye in recent months, portraying the country as a potential rival that aims to expand its regional influence. Turkiye, for its part, blasted the Israeli strikes as “reckless”.

Katz denounced Barrack’s comments as “full of inaccuracies and positions that contradict the stance of US President [Donald] Trump himself”, regarding Israel’s military occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights.

While Barrack has acknowledged the territory as occupied, the first Trump administration recognised Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights in 2019.

The Syrian territory is considered occupied under international law, after it was captured from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.