Israel Secretly Agrees to Fund Vaccines for Syria as part of prisoner swap
When a young Israeli woman was released in Syria last week after being arrested for illegally crossing into Syria, the official story was that she had been the beneficiary of a simple prisoner exchange. In exchange for their freedom, the Israeli government announced, they had traded her for two Syrian shepherds captured by the Israelis.
But if this agreement between two enemy states, who have never shared diplomatic relations, sounded too quick and easy, it was. In fact, Israel had also secretly agreed to a much more controversial bailout: funding an undisclosed number of coronavirus vaccines for Syria, according to an official familiar with the content of the negotiations.
Under the agreement, Israel will pay Russia, which mediated it, to send Russian-made Sputnik V vaccines to the regime of President Bashar Assad of Syria, the official said. Israel has administered at least one vaccine to almost half of its population of 9.2 million, while Syria, now entering its 11th year of civil war, has yet to begin deployment of the vaccine.
The Israeli government declined to comment on the vaccine aspect of the deal, while a Syrian state-controlled news outlet, the Syrian Arab News Agency, denied that the vaccines were part of the deal. When asked about vaccines in a television interview on Saturday night, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sidestepped the question, saying only that no Israeli vaccines were being shipped to Syria.
“We have brought the woman, I am glad,” Netanyahu said. He expressed his gratitude to President Vladimir Putin of Russia and said: “I will not add more.”
The agreement constitutes a rare moment of uneasy cooperation between two states that have fought several wars and still dispute sovereignty over a tract of land, the Golan Heights, that Israel captured from Syria in 1967.
It also highlights how vaccines are increasingly a feature of international diplomacy. And it reflects a vast and growing disparity between rich states, like Israel, which have made considerable progress with coronavirus vaccines and may soon return to some kind of normalcy, and poor, like Syria, who have not.
Among Palestinians, news reports on the Israel-Syria deal have increased frustrations over the low number of doses of vaccines provided by Israel to Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Israel has supplied only a few thousand doses to the approximately 2.8 million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, and last week the Israeli government briefly delayed the delivery of the first batch of vaccines to Gaza, where nearly 2 million live. of people.
Israel maintains that the Oslo Accords exempt it from responsibility for providing Palestinian medical care. But rights defenders and Palestinians cite the fourth Geneva convention, which forces an occupying power to coordinate with local authorities to maintain public health within an occupied territory.
Israeli officials have said they must vaccinate their own population before turning to the Palestinians. But the agreement with Syria sends a different message, said Khaled Elgindy, a researcher and former adviser to the Palestinian leadership.
“Israel is willing to provide vaccines to Syrians outside its borders, but at the same time it does not provide them to a huge occupied population for which they are legally responsible,” Elgindy said. “That seems to send a message that they are deliberately trying to evade their legal responsibility to look out for the well-being of this occupied population.”
Among Israelis, the prisoner swap has raised concerns about how a civilian was able to cross the tense and highly guarded border with Syria without being detected by Israeli authorities.
The 23-year-old woman crossed into Syria near Mount Hermon on February 2 without being initially detected by Israeli or Syrian forces, the official said. His name cannot currently be published by court order.
Israel learned that she was missing only when her friends informed the police that she was missing. He entered Syrian detention only after a Syrian civilian who approached him realized he was Israeli and called the police.
Israel then asked Russia, a Syrian ally with a strong military presence in the country, to help mediate its release.
Russia and Israel have coordinated during similar episodes in the past. In 2016, Russia helped mediate the return of an Israeli tank seized by Syrian forces in 1982 in Lebanon. In 2019, Moscow facilitated the return of the body of an Israeli soldier killed during the same confrontation, Zachary Baumel.
The woman grew up in an ultra-Orthodox family in a settlement in the West Bank, and was said to have a history of attempts to illegally enter Israel’s Arab neighbors, once in Jordan and once in Gaza. On both occasions, she was detained by Israeli forces, returned, interrogated, and warned not to do so again.
Israeli negotiators tried to act quickly to prevent a recurrence of the crisis that followed the disappearance in Gaza of Avera Mengistu, a man with a history of mental illness who marched into the strip in 2014 and has since been detained by Hamas, the militant. . group, which frequently raises the price of their release.
Netanyahu spoke directly to Putin twice, while Israeli national security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat spoke with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev.
The Syrians first demanded the release of two Syrian residents of the Golan Heights imprisoned in Israel, but that agreement was broken after it turned out that the two did not wish to return to Syria.
Israel then offered the release of the two herders and, at some point in the negotiations, the possibility of vaccines was raised.
The Israeli cabinet voted to accept the terms of the deal on Tuesday, the same day the 23-year-old was transferred to Moscow. Following further negotiations between Israeli and Russian officials, she was returned to Israel on Thursday.
She is a freelance blogger, writer, and speaker, and writes for various entertainment magazines.