Israel’s Syrian border continues to heat up. At 1:30 AM Tuesday, shots were opened on an IDF patrol in the Golan Heights, and the force returned fire.

An examination turned out that some bullets hit the patrol vehicle, but no one was injured. A military source said it is still unclear whether this was the result of fire “leaking” over from the clashes between President Bashar Assad’s army and rebels, or deliberate fire.

The IDF force responded by firing a missile at the position from which the shooting took place, and a precise hit at the target was identified.

This is the third such incident since last Saturday night, with someone on the Syrian side opening fire at IDF troops. On Saturday night an IDF jeep was hit, but no damage or injuries were recorded. Early Monday morning, there was a second firing incident near Tel Hazaka, where currently there are severe clashes between rebel forces and Syrian government soldiers.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz has given the order for IDF patros to shoot back at any source of fire from the other side of the border. But in two of the recent three cases the patrols could not locate the source of fire.

The website Walla reports a concern in the IDF that the Golan Heights region could become a magnet for terrorist attacks against Israeli soldiers near borderline perimeter fence. A sector officer told Walla that the military is getting ready to face any eventuality in the area.

Over the past few months, its has been reported that rebel forces, comprised mostly of Al Qaeda fighters, have been pulling to the south of Syria, as the battles between the two sides are raging. On Saturday, the beleaguered Syrian President accused Israel of supporting the rebels in order to bring him down. But Sources in the Israeli security services have been stressing that the “devil we know,” Assad, is by far preferable to Israel over his enemies.

Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an interview with the Argentine newspaper Clarin Saturday that he has no plans to step down before elections are held in Syria, utterly rejecting the demand by the rebels that the civil war must conclude with his departure.

Assad was described by Clarin as looking more like a business executive than a beleaguered dictator. He spoke calmly, defending the tough approach of his military offensive across Syria, and denying the veracity of the publicized body count (more than 70 thousand) in UN reports. He also denied allegations of his troops using chemical weapons like saran gas, and rejected complaints that his military, well equipped with Russian weapons, are using excessive force in the crackdown.

He said that although his government supports the international conference which will be held in Geneva in late May, between Washington and Moscow, to discuss an end to the Syrian crisis, but was skeptical about the results.

Still, Assad’s comments to Clarin were his first public discussion of his possible role in any political transition. So far, neither the Assad government nor the Syrian National Coalition have announced that they would participate in such a process.

Assad acknowledged that there is fear within his regime of a possible invasion. “It is a valid probability, especially after we have hit the armed groups in many parts of Syria and the balance of forces on the ground began to change,” he remarked. “Then these countries asked Israel to attack us, to boost the morale of the terrorist groups,” he added.

Assad wryly denied the allegations made by Israel and the United States on his use of chemical weapons in the war, and attributed their use to the rebels. “Those statements regarding chemical weapons changed daily. Chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction. They say it was used in residential areas. If I said to you that a nuclear bomb was dropped on a suburb and the balance of casualties is ten or twenty people, would you believe me? The use of chemical weapons in residential areas means killing thousands or tens of thousands of people in minutes. Who could hide such a thing?”

Assad insisted that the rebels he is facing are ultra-Islamist terrorists, seeking to overthrow his secular government, and they’re receiving aid from the West. He accuses the Americans of cooperating with Qatar and Saudi Arabia to impose an extremist regimein Syria.

Assad said he was like the skipper of a ship in a stormy sea, “the country is in a crisis and when a ship faces a storm, the captain does not flee.”

The first thing the skipper does “is face the storm and guide the ship back to safety,” Assad declared. “I am not someone who shirks his responsibilities.”

Rebels, termed “terrorists” by the Assad regime, killed six people in a car bomb explosion in Damascus that failed to claim the life of its main target, Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi.

Official state media broadcast the report of the car bomb, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed it.

The apparent suicide attack was carried out as al-Halaqui’s convoy was passing by in a government-controlled area that includes a key military airport.

Information from Syria is extremely unreliable from both the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and opposition groups.

An Arab with Israeli citizenship allegedly turned against the state and now is the first Israeli Arab to be charged with joining Syrian jihadists and fight with the rebels, according to an indictment filed in an Israeli court Wednesday.

The case has been under wraps since his arrest last at Ben Gurion Airport after the citizen, 29-year-old Hikmat Massarwa, returned from Syria via Turkey.

His lawyer claimed that Massarwa had no intention of harming Israel and was in Syria for the innocent purpose of locating his brother, who left Israel for Syria several weeks ago and also is suspected of joining  Al Qaeda-affiliated groups.

The increasingly frequent phenomenon of Arabs helping enemy states is of great concern not only to intelligence officials but also to politicians.

Avigdor Lieberman, who heads the Israel Beitenu faction that has since joined the Likud party, has won broad support from nationalists and horrified center-left parties by pushing for a loyalty oath and insisting that Arabs have no less an obligation to the country to fulfill a term of national service.

Israeli Arabs have no less than former Knesset Member Azmi Bishara to look “up” to as a model for a fifth column.

He fled the country six years ago after being indicted for passing on intelligent information to Hizbullah during the Second Lebanon War, in which thousands of Israeli soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded in the 34-day war that devastated northern Israel, including Haifa.

The Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) said that Massarwa, a resident of an Arab area called the “triangle” because of its three-sided area between Netanya and Tel Aviv and the western border of Samaria, is a foreign agent.

Massarwa’s lawyer argued that after his client entered Syria to look for his brother, he was forced “to be part of this population,” referring to Syrian rebels associated with jihadists.

“He did not join the rebels. He helped them build tents and so on, said the attorney, Helal Jabar. “It seems more than a few Israeli Arabs have done this.”

Security agents asserted that rebels in Syria asked Massarwa about information concerning IDF weapons and the nuclear reactor in Dimona and that he was asked to carry out a terrorist attack in Israel, a request he refused.

Arabs with Israeli  citizenship have plenty of encouragement to work against the state. Most Arab Knesset Members not only side with the Palestinian Authority but also often speak against Zionism and the existence of a Jewish state. MK Hanin Zoabi boarded the Mavi Mamara flotilla ship, manned by IHH terrorists, three years ago and has incited against the state.

She has called Israel “inherently racist,” rejects the idea of Israel as a Jewish country, and Zoabi has backed Iran’s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon, apparently preferring to die in an Iranian nuclear attack if Israel would be destroyed at the same time.

Other magnets for Israeli Arabs to help destroy Israel include the Hamas regime in Gaza, which recruit Bedouin Negev, turning several Arab population centers, such as Tel Sheva next to Be’er Sheva, into Hamas strongholds that Israeli police are frightened to enter.

Another attraction for Israeli Arabs to become Israeli traitors is the Palestinian Authority, whose official maps define Arab Palestine’s borders as the Mediterranean Sea in the west, the Jordan River on the east, and the Lebanese and Egyptian borders on the north and south.

With the spillover of the Syrian war into Jordan and Lebanon, and occasional fire on the Israeli side of the Golan Heights, Massarwa may not be the last Israeli Arab citizen to be charged with helping the enemy.

With Hamas ruling over Gaza and recruiting Bedouin allies in the Negev and with Palestinian Authority Arabs increasingly frustrated with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ failure to improve their political and economic lives, the Syrian civil war is another inducement to work against Israel.

With the spillover of the Syrian war into Jordan and Lebanon, and occasional fire on the Israeli side of the Golan Heights, Massarwa may not be the last Israeli Arab citizen to be charged with helping the enemy.

Syrian rebel fighters have refused to accept a Syrian-born and naturalized American citizen as their show prime minister, destroying an American effort to put into place an organizational structure to help channeling aid to rebels in the war against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Texas resident and IT executive Ghassan Hitto narrowly won last week’s election as “prime minister” amid warnings by rebels that they do not hold enough territory in Syria to warrant an interim government.

Hitto was backed not only by Western governments but also by organizations outside of Syria, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, making him even more suspicious to opponents.

Syrian National Coalition president Mouaz al-Khatib wrote on his Facebook page Sunday, “I am keeping my promise today and announcing my resignation from the National Coalition so that I can work with freedom that is not available inside the official institutions.”

He blamed Western powers for failing to give enough material support to the rebels while trying to punish them into dialogue with Assad, whose army and secret service have murdered tens of thousands of men, women and children in the two-year-old rebellion.

Secretary of State John Kerry steadfastly continued U.S. foreign policy of living in its own world and insisted that the resignation only proves that there is in Syria “an opposition that is bigger than one person and that opposition will continue.”

Kerry, in case anyone forgets, visited Damascus often when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and struck up a dialogue with Assad, who in turn was termed a “reformer” by Kerry’s predecessor Hillary Clinton two weeks after the beginning of the revolt against him.

Syrian rebels have narrowly elected a Syrian with American citizenship as their interim leader, opponents say the move is ridiculous because of their lack of solid control of rebels over parts of Syria.

The rebel’s leader is Ghassan Hitto, 50, an information technology executive who lived in Texas until recently, The New York Times reported. The Obama administration has been pressuring rebels to setup an alternative government to help establish clear channels for directing aid to them.

Hitto narrowly defeated a former minister of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but critics said the vote is meaningless because Assad’s Air Force controls the skies over Syria.

Hitto left his career as an information technology executive and traveled to help rebels in Syria in the footsteps of his son, one of four children born in the United States to him and his wife, an American school teacher.

The European Union may be preparing to provide weapons training to the rebels fighting Syrian president Bashar Assad, Spiegel reports. Although a statement issued by the organization last week only discussed “technical assistance,” it appears that tha the U.K. and France are ready to provide more “hands-on help,” This as the idea of arming the rebels is gaining popularity.

It should be noted that over the past two years there hasn’t seemed to exist a discernable difference in the degree of cruelty and lack of concern for human life between the two sides. It should also be noted that, by bolstering the Suni rebels, the Western powers would be sentencing the Alawites, Assad’s minority ethnic group, to mass annihilation.

In many ways, the civil war in Syria is turning out to be a war fought between proxies, in which the government forces are supported by Iran and Russia, and now the rebels are picking up the support of the West.

Vietnam revisited?

Officially, the statement released by the European Union regarding sanctions against Syria referred only to supplying rebel fighters with “non-lethal military equipment” and “technical assistance for the protection of civilians.”

But Spiegel has learned that this assistance also includes weapons training for rebel troops in their battles against soldiers loyal to Assad. The EU expects that Britain and France will deploy military consultants to support the rebels. But sources within the German government said that Berlin has no plans to send experts.

The U.S. has also announced recently that it would begin supplying non-lethal supplies to opposition forces for the first time.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Sunday that Britain did not rule out providing arms to Syrian rebels in the future.

Despite Germany’s reluctance to get involved in Syria, there are influential voices there calling for sending weapons to the Syrian opposition. Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, has spoken out in favor of arming the rebels.

“The bitter lesson of the Bosnian war is that the policy of not delivering weapons to either side neither curbs nor curtails the conflict,” he told Spiegel. “It is high time that Germany and its partners discuss supporting Syrian rebels with equipment up to and including weapons.”

Ischinger cited the need to protect the Syrian population as well as the strategic interests of Germany and the West. “All we have done so far is lay a foundation for ensuring that we have no friends in post-Assad Syria,” he said.

Ischinger was not concerned with the possibility that the arms would end up in the wrong hands. “If the West supplies arms itself, it has more chance of influencing how they are used,” he argued.

Famous last words?

More than 70,000 Syrians—most of them civilians—have been killed over the past two years. Hundreds of thousands have fled across the borders to Jordan and Turkey, and even more fleeing to shelters within Syria. The EU has so far offered some €200 million in humanitarian relief.

Last Sunday, in an interview with the British Sunday Times, Assad slammed the West for helping his enemies, objecting most strongly to Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement that the U.S. would provide medical supplies and other non-lethal aid directly to the rebels, in addition to $60 million in assistance.

Assad said he is ready for dialogue with rebels and militants, but only if they surrender their weapons.

So that’s never.