Two days after Israeli warplanes carried out air strikes that destroyed sections of a decommissioned military air base in northern Syria, just kilometers from the Turkish border, a high-profile opinion piece published Thursday in Israel Hayom, a leading right-wing Israeli outlet, has thrown fuel on an already volatile regional standoff over expanding Turkish military presence in Syrian territory.
The column, written by Shay Gal, founder of the government relations and strategy firm Line of State, argues that any Turkish combat troops that deploy inside Syria would become vulnerable targets for Israeli military strikes, because NATO’s collective defense guarantee does not extend to military forces operating outside a member nation’s sovereign borders. Gal notes that Israeli security analysts have thoroughly mapped the limits of NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause, which only protects the recognized home territory of alliance members. “The treaty protects Turkish territory; Turkish troops do not carry that territory with them onto Syrian or occupied Cypriot soil,” Gal wrote.
Gal explained that Israel’s pre-emptive strike on the Abu al-Duhur air base was a deliberate calculation to act before Turkish forces could establish a permanent foothold. “Before Turkish troops arrive, the target is infrastructure; once they arrive, striking it also risks Turkish casualties, retaliation, American intervention and confrontation with a NATO member. Those costs alter the calculation, not Israel’s authority to decide,” he added. The opinion piece frames Turkey’s growing military engagement in post-Assad Syria as an existential threat to Israeli security, pointing to Ankara’s expanding influence across the country: Turkish military teams have already scouted potential base locations at T4, Palmyra, and Hama, all of which have been struck by Israeli warplanes after the inspections.
Gal warned that Israel is determined to avoid a repeat of the decades-long Turkish military occupation of northern Cyprus, acting to nip any permanent deployment in the region before it can mature.
The opinion piece carries outsized political weight because Israel Hayom is owned by Miriam Adelson, an Israeli-American billionaire who is one of the largest financial donors to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s political campaigns, and Trump has publicly acknowledged that Adelson holds significant influence over his administration’s Middle East policy. That connection adds a layer of geopolitical complexity to the already fraught dynamics, as the Trump administration has significantly deepened U.S. ties with Ankara in recent months.
The Israeli government has openly identified the administration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a strategic foe that seeks to undermine Israeli national security, but the tightening U.S.-Turkey alignment under Trump has created a new diplomatic balancing act for Israeli leaders. In the wake of the strike, U.S. officials have openly criticized the Israeli action.
Tom Barrack, who serves as both U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and U.S. envoy to Syria, confirmed this week that Turkey received no advance warning of the air strikes, despite a U.S.-brokered deconfliction hotline between Israel and Ankara that has been in place in Syria for a year. Barrack told Reuters that the incident exposed a critical breakdown in communication between all parties in the region. “This underscores the need for a deconfliction mechanism involving Israel, Syria and Turkey. That is something we are actively working on to establish in order to prevent future miscommunication,” he said.
Barrack pushed back against Israeli justifications for the strike in a post on X Tuesday, arguing that the attack constituted unnecessary escalation against the new Syrian government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. “The Al-Sharaa government has neither adopted a predatory posture nor maintained proxy forces. It has, in fact, repeatedly indicated a preference for de-escalation with Israel,” Barrack wrote. “We are deeply concerned. [This] does not advance regional stability.”
Official accounts from both Damascus and Ankara contradict Israeli claims that the air base was set to imminently host a Turkish combat deployment. The Syrian government issued a formal condemnation of the attack, confirming that eight precision strikes hit the base’s runway in the early hours of Tuesday local time. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, confirmed that a Turkish military delegation had visited the airfield in the days before the strike as part of plans to reactivate the facility.
However, Syrian officials told Middle East Eye that only a Turkish technical team was present at the base to carry out repairs to the runway and control tower, with no full combat deployment in place. “The last team tasked with reconstructing the base was there two days beforehand,” one senior Syrian official said. Officials emphasized that Turkey is assisting the new Syrian government in rebuilding national military capacity across the country, with no aggressive plans targeting Israel. “Turkey doesn’t take over every base,” the official added, noting that Ankara has actually closed dozens of small outposts in northern Syria and only maintains a handful of established permanent bases in the region.
Israeli officials defended the strike in a statement released late Tuesday, saying that the operation was necessary to uphold the long-standing security status quo between Israel and Syria, which Damascus was set to violate by allowing Turkish troops to deploy at the base near Aleppo. Since former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia in December 2024, Israel has launched a sustained campaign of air and ground operations across northern and western Syria, focused primarily on degrading the remaining Syrian air force infrastructure and expanding Israeli control into the UN-managed buffer zone along the shared border.