"There is an international obligation, dating back to 2013, to remove all chemical weapons from Syria. As we can see, it was not fully implemented. We urge the international community to bring the work to the end, and this is an opportunity for US-Russian cooperation in this particular sphere," Netanyahu said at the Cabinet meeting.
Netanyahu stressed once again that Israel fully supported the US strikes against Syria's airfield, which came as response to the alleged chemical arms use in the country's Idlib province earlier this week.
"They made it basing on moral grounds in light of Idlib violent scenes, and in order to make it clear that the use of chemical weapons has its cost," Netanyahu added.
The Syrian foreign minister denied the government’s involvement in the Idlib incident, saying it had never nor would it ever use chemical weapons on either civilians or terrorists operating in the country.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that the airstrike near Khan Shaykhun by the Syrian air force hit a terrorist warehouse that stored chemical weapons slated for delivery to Iraq, and called on the UN Security Council to launch a proper investigation into the incident.
Earlier this year, Syrian President Bashar Assad said that the country’s government had never used weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons, against the Syrian people. Besides, under a Russian-US deal after the east Ghouta sarin gas incident in 2013, Damascus joined the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and agreed to destroy its stockpile under Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) oversight. In January 2016, the OPCW announced that all chemical weapons in Syria had been destroyed.
