JERUSALEM // A member of Israel’s Arab minority has flown across the border into Syria using a paraglider to join rebel forces, the Israeli army said.
The paraglider took off from the southern section of the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, next to southern Syria.
A Syrian rebel whose group operates in the area said the paraglider had come down either in Quneitra province or western Deraa. Local rebel groups include the Southern Front alliance affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, and a group called the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade, which other rebels believe is affiliated with Islamic State.
“A surveillance post identified an Israeli civilian entering Syrian territory using a paraglider,” late on Saturday, an army statement said.
The man flew eastward against the prevailing wind, an indication he went deliberately and was not blown into Syria by accident.
The infiltration, which took place on Saturday evening, prompted intensive searches. Witnesses on the Golan said Israeli aircraft were circling and dropping illumination flares.
The military issued a brief statement on Sunday saying that its investigation “indicates that the civilian that entered [Syria] is a resident of Jaljulia,” a largely Muslim Arab town in central Israel.
Israeli media gave the man’s age as 23 and quoted investigators as speculating that he sought to join insurgents trying to bring down Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
Israel is publicly neutral on Syria’s four-year-old civil war but bans travel there by its citizens. In recent years it has stepped up scrutiny of those suspected of trying to reach the country through intermediary states like Turkey.
Israel’s Shin Bet security service, which is investigating the paraglider penetration, says that more than 40 Arab citizens and Palestinians from Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem have tried to join ISIL in its Syrian or Iraqi fiefdoms, mainly entering through Turkey.
Speaking at the start of his Sunday cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he would be taking measures to revoke the citizenship of “the Israeli who crossed our Golan border to join enemy forces in Syria.”
*Agencies
