A recently uploaded video of a four–man Syrian rebel anti-tank unit in Western Syria appears to validate Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz’s stated fears that a Palestinian Authority West Bank State would expose Israel’s main north-south highway, Route Six, to a “Palestinian state armed with thousands of rockets and antitank missiles.”
Previously, in April 2011, from the Gaza Strip, Palestinian terrorists fired a similar anti-tank missile into yellow school bus in Israel murdering a Daniel Viflic, a 16-year-old Israeli boy.
The new video, posted by the Liwa al-Adiyat rebel group, shows Syrian rebels team successfully firing a US-origin "Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided" TOW missile into a Syrian T-72 tank. While the missile featured in the Syrian rebel video has a range of about 4 km, the Russian-built Kornet anti-tank missile used in the Gaza attack that murdered Daniel Viflic has a 5 km range. The Kornet missile has both an anti-tank spike and a “thermobaric” fuel-air anti-personnel warhead.
The video's uploaders say it was taken in August, 2014, near the town of Baraka, in the Latakia province, a mountainous Alawite-majority region of western Syria bordering the Mediterranean Sea.
The uploaded video shows a Syrian rebel anti-tank team deploying in a mildly mountainous terrain similar to the mountains of Judea and Samaria, perched over the Israeli coastal plain that holds 70% of Israel’s population and 80% of her industrial base.
The Syrian rebel team is first seen carrying a disassembled anti-tank missile system, quickly assembling it, and then, using the high ground of a mountainous area to gain an perch, firing their anti-tank missile with deadly accuracy into a modern super-armored, top-of-the-line T-72 Syria government tank, blowing it to smithereens.
In early September 2014, Minister Steinitz addressed a security conference and stated that since the Disengagement, "16,000 rockets have been fired at us, not including mortars. Palestinians have to prove that they can demilitarize Gaza... If they can’t do that, what are they offering us? A Palestinian state armed with thousands of rockets and antitank missiles?
"If this repeats itself in Judea and Samaria, this becomes an existential threat... these shells, with ranges of up to 7 km., fired from Judea and Samaria, cover Jerusalem, Petah Tikva and large parts of Route 6 connecting northern Israel to its south. What constitutes a severe threat in Gaza, becomes an existential threat from Judea and Samaria.”
Given the evident threat to Israel’s Route 6 from Palestinian anti-tank fire, Minister Steinitz appears to have correctly assessed that “PA President Mahmoud Abbas is offering Israel a recipe for collective suicide.”