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UN Warns of Israel-Syria Escalation

The UN secretary-general warned today that the cease-fire between Israel and Syria is in jeopardy as Austrian forces have withdrawn from the UN Disengagement Observer Force.
Austrian United Nations (U.N.) peacekeeping soldiers and a dog stand at attention after they arrived at the Vienna International airport in Schwechat June 12, 2013. Austria has begun withdrawing peacekeepers from the Golan Heights, winding down a four-decade mission due to spillover fighting from the Syrian civil war, the defence ministry said. The Austrians have patrolled the buffer zone between Israel and Syria as part of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, known as UNDOF, since it was set up

Austria's precipitous withdrawal of forces from the UN-mandated force monitoring the disengagement of the Israeli and Syrian armies in the Golan Heights is yet another alarming signal of the breakdown of the rules of the game that have governed not only relations between Israel and Syria for more than four decades, but also those between the two superpowers of Russia and the United States.

These rules, formulated in the aftermath of the last superpower confrontation in the region during the October 1973 war, established international support for the framework that has preserved a de facto peace between Israeli and Syrian armies on the Golan front and more broadly, set the terms of superpower competition in the region that has continued even after the end of the communist regime in the last century.

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