Itamar Ben-Gvir again called for the assassination of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa. Israel’s extreme right-wing minister, still serving in the National Security in March 2026, thus resumed a line that had already been publicly assumed in July 2025, when he said that Israel should « eliminate » the Syrian leader and « cut off the serpent’s head ». This time, the revival of this discourse comes in a much more burdensome context, while post-Assad Syria is still trying to stabilize itself, regional tensions remain high and the personal security of al-Sharaa is already being seriously alerted.
The main fact does not require euphemism. Ben-Gvir is not talking here about diplomatic pressure, deterrent strikes or political isolation. He calls for the Syrian head of state to be killed. The formula is all the more serious as it comes from a minister in office, who speaks from the heart of the Israeli government and not from the militant margin. This slide is not just verbal. It puts the idea of the physical elimination of a neighbouring president in the field of the Israeli public debate, at a time when Damascus is trying to rebuild a minimum of institutional credibility after the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
A call to murder assumed
Ben-Gvir’s previously documented statements are unambiguous. In July 2025,Times of Israelreported that the minister claimed that Israel should « eliminate » Ahmad al-Sharaa, while JNS was even more directly calling on the Syrian leader to « kill ». The same JNS article quotes Ben-Gvir saying: « We need to do one more thing: Eliminate al-Julani. Get rid of Him. He’s a jihadist. Why are we Lettering Him Live? In other words, the idea of killing the Syrian president is neither a hostile interpretation nor an exaggeration of his opponents. It is formulated by Ben-Gvir himself.
The phrase on the « snake’s head » is not anomaly either. In the Israeli political and security lexicon, this image refers to a logic of strategic beheading: one does not merely contain a threat, one pretends to destroy by striking its center. Applied to Ahmad al-Sharaa, it means that Ben-Gvir does not consider the present Syria as an unstable neighbouring State with which to manage power relations, but as a political body whose leadership should be removed. This rhetoric further strengthens an Israeli-Syrian relationship already poisoned by strikes, border tensions and the issue of Syrian minorities.
This return of the same speech gives above all a clear political indication: it is no longer a slippage. Repeating is a system. Ben-Gvir returns to the same idea, with the same imagination, against the same man. The enemy, in its reading grid, is not a specific security apparatus, an armed group or a local militia, but the Syrian president himself. By aiming at the head of the state, it pushes the debate towards a threshold where targeted elimination becomes no longer an exception tool, but a legitimate horizon.
Ahmad al-Sharaa is not a faction leader, but the Syrian president
It is this point that gives the case its true scope. Ahmad al-Sharaa is described by Reuters as the Syrian President since January 2025, at a time when the transition opened by the fall of Assad has redesigned the political order in Damascus. In March 2026, Reuters continued to speak of the « under Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa government » and to present it as the central authority of the new Syrian phase. AP also described it as a Syrian president during his visit to Washington in late 2025. Therefore, Ben-Gvir’s call does not refer to an ambiguous or unestablished figure. It is aimed at the head of an existing neighbouring State.
This institutional quality changes everything. We can recall, of course, the past of al-Sharaa, long associated with Syrian jihadism and the world of al-Qaeda before its breakdown and political conversion. But this past does not erase its present status. For more than a year, his power has sought to present itself as a transitional State capable of reconnecting with Western interlocutors, regaining control of the territory and reorganizing part of the Syrian institutions. Reuters reported in January 2026 that al-Sharaa had consolidated its control over Kurdish areas and had imposed itself as the privileged Syrian interlocutor in Washington on certain cases.
The timing of this new Ben-Gvir release is therefore not neutral. Syria is trying to project a relative normalization image. Reuters explained in March 2026 that the new Syrian government wanted to eliminate the legacy of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons and further open the country to international inspectors. A few weeks earlier, the agency also referred to the Syrian authorities’ efforts to consolidate the security of al-Sharaa, to the point that the Turkish services had asked the British MI6 to strengthen its role in its protection. When Ben-Gvir calls for his death, he strikes a president whom his allies are already trying to protect against real threats of assassination.
A statement in the Israeli far right line
Treating this episode as a simple personal abuse would be misleading. Ben-Gvir is not an outside agitator. TheJerusalem Post,The Times of IsraelReuters,The GuardianAt the end of March 2026, Anadolu presented him as Israeli Minister of National Security. His party, Otzma Yehudit, continues to occupy a structuring position in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. His statements are therefore politically located: they come from a leader who has a real weight in defining the security and ideological climate in Israel.
His recent activism on the death penalty also shows how much his line remains based on punitive radicalization. TheJerusalem Postwrote on 24 March 2026 that Ben-Gvir was still pushing his capital punishment bill for Palestinians convicted of terrorism.The Guardiandescribed this proposal as a new step in the hardening pushed by the Israeli far right. This continuity counts: a minister who pushes the death penalty inside and calls for the killing of a neighbouring president outside follows the same political logic, that of elimination as a central tool of government.
Ben-Gvir’s centrality in the Israeli apparatus also explains why his words weigh more than those of a mere deputy. TheTimes of IsraelIt was further recalled on 17 March 2026 that he was the subject of legal proceedings for his retention in government, in particular because of what the complainants describe as an illegal influence on the police, appointments and investigations. In other words, it is contested, but it does remain in power. This institutional position makes each of its statements a political signal, not a mere peripheral provocation.
Syria as a new central enemy
Perhaps the most striking thing in Ben-Gvir’s formula is the displacement it operates. For years, the imagination of the « snake head » has mostly referred to Iran in the Israeli discourse. The re-applying in Damascus is to promote the idea that Syria d’al-Sharaa is not only a secondary regional problem, but a main enemy, or at least an opponent that should be treated according to the same logic of beheading. This significantly increases the level of symbolic confrontation between Israel and Syria.
This shift is partly due to the violence that struck the Syrian Druze in 2025. It was in this context that Ben-Gvir initially called for the elimination of al-Sharaa. TheTimes of IsraelAt that time, Israel was attacking targets in Syria and Israeli Druze were demonstrating strongly to demand intervention. Ben-Gvir sought to appear as the hardest defender of the Druze while converting this crisis into an argument for the assassination of the Syrian president. But the bottom exceeds this one sequence. At home, it is a matter of presenting the « new Syria » as a facade behind which would survive a jihadist threat that Israel should treat without delay.
This construction is politically useful to the Israeli far right. It neutralizes any attempt to read post-Assad Syria more nuanced. It doesn’t matter that Damascus is trying to take up a language with Western capitals, to frame the chemical issue or to negotiate its regional place: in Ben-Gvir’s account, none of this matters. Ahmad al-Sharaa is not a president in transition, but an essential enemy, a jihadist who should be killed. This type of narrative closes the space of any potential diplomacy and permanently installs the logic of preventive war as the only admissible horizon.
Target already under threat
The resurgence of this call for murder becomes even more acute when we look at the Syrian President’s security situation. Reuters revealed in early March 2026 that the Turkish services had asked the British MI6 to increase its participation in the protection of Ahmad al-Sharaa, following recent risks or assassination plots. Reuters explicitly spoke of concerns related to real threats against the Syrian President. Al Jazeera, based on UN elements, also referred to several foiled attempts against him and Syrian ministers. In other words, Ben-Gvir calls for the killing of a leader already considered a plausible target by several security actors.
This data removes any temptation to trivialize the episode. We are not in the simple register of political hyperbole. When the risk of assassination is already taken seriously by intelligence agencies, the fact that an Israeli minister again pleads for the elimination of the Syrian president objectively increases the tension around his security. Even if such a declaration does not amount to an operational order, it participates in the public legitimization of a violent scenario that already exists in regional security calculations.
But Damascus is trying to give an inverse image. Reuters recently highlighted the Syrian authorities’ willingness to turn the Assad page, particularly on the chemical weapons issue. AP already described at the end of 2025 the spectacular normalization offensive led by al-Sharaa to Washington. This strategy has its limits, its shadow zones and its contradictions. But it exists. Ben-Gvir’s call to kill the Syrian president is therefore not just targeting a man. It also aims at the very possibility that a post-Assad Syria may recompose itself as a legitimate political interlocutor.
