YNet News reported:
Protestors at northern border promised $1,000 reward by Assad’s regime, Reform Party of Syria claims; Israeli officials: Damascus encouraged rioters. Syria says IDF killed 23 people, wounded 350; army says figures inflated.
Protestors for hire? Demonstrators along the Syria-Israel border were paid thousands of dollars by President Bashar Assad’s regime to take part in Sunday’s riots, Syrian opposition activists charge.
Israeli officials later reinforced the claims, accusing the Syrian regime of encouraging protests along the northern border.
Sunday’s riots were an attempt “to divert attention away from the massacre in Syria,” one official charged. “The Syrians will be held accountable for these events.”
Late Sunday, Syrian officials claimed that 23 people were killed and 350 were wounded after the IDF fired at protestors aiming to rush the border fence earlier in the day. However, the army dismissed the figures, claiming that they were inflated.
Washington-based members of the Reform Party of Syria said intelligence sources close to the Syrian government in Lebanon informed them that the protesters on the Syrian side of the Druze community of Majdal Shams were in fact poverty-stricken farmers paid by the Assad regime.
