On April 3, an unnamed Syrian army officer made the warning clear. By continuing to advance on Damascus, he said, "the rebels and their leaders" were assured of "certain death."At about the same time, the Syrian ruler had ordered protective suits for chemical warfare and gas masks distributed to the 4th and 3rd Divisions defending the capital. Tank commanders were told to activate their filtering systems against chemical and biological agents.
Protective suits have since been distributed to the Syrian army units fighting in southern Syria and the Golan.
These steps were registered by the joint counter-chemical warfare center set up between the US, Israel, Turkey and Jordan when President Barack Obama visited their capitals in the third week of March. In the last few days, Israeli troops were asked by this center to start handing out atropine injections or IV drips to Syrian rebels fighting Syrian troops on the Golan.
Atropine is highly effective for blocking such nerve agents as sarin, VX, soman and tabun and counteracting the effects of poisoning, such as nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramping and low heart rate.
The IDF's distribution of a chemical weapon antidote to Syrian rebels may be regarded as the first Israeli intervention in the Syrian conflict.
The British disclosure April 12 in the Times of London of soil samples smuggled out of Syria provided forensic evidence of the use of chemical weapons but carefully avoided assigning responsibility.
Though containing traces of "some kind of chemical weapon" collected from an unidentified "neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus,"