Operation Mole Cricket 19 - Aftermath

Aftermath

That night, the IAF destroyed the Syrian Army's 47th Armored Brigade north of Baalbek as it was moving south, and the following day, the IAF destroyed six other SAM batteries, two that remained from the operation and four that the Syrians moved into the Beqaa valley that night. Syrian Defense Minister, Mustafa Tlass told Assad that "the Syrian Air Force was outclassed, the ground-to-air missiles useless, and that without air cover, the army could not fight on".

Sharon later said that "If we would have tolerated that development, the Syrian armored forces would have consisted of 600 tanks protected by an extensive missile umbrella. Their missile batteries fired at our planes. We had no choice other than to approve a military operation to destroy the missile buildup". He called the operation "the turning point" in the invasion. A senior IAF officer, widely believed to be Ivry himself, later said that "Syrian aircraft were fighting from a disadvantage, having to respond to the Israeli threat wherever and whenever it materialized, within a general strategic and tactical situation not in Syria's favor."

Tzipori later wrote in his book that Sharon tricked the Cabinet into believing that the confrontation with the Syrians was unexpected, and that Sharon had in fact been planning the attack since the eve of the war. Sharon maintained that on June 6 he had ordered the IDF not to cross the Awali River and to avoid a confrontation with the Syrians. Sharon said he did order the army to prepare for a contingency plan, however, to drive on the Beirut-Damascus highway in case the Syrians attacked first. Eitan claimed that on the night before the operation, he had agreed with Sharon to prepare the IAF for the attack, in case the Cabinet approved it. Senior Israeli commanders said after the operation that Operation Peace for Galilee could have been achieved without confronting the Syrians.

On Wednesday, Assad sent Tlass to Moscow to seek a comprehensive air umbrella. The Soviets refused but prepared large amounts of military equipment at airfields for dispatch to Syria and sent Marshall Pavel Stepanovich Kutakhov to Syria to find out what happened to the Syrian SAMs, fearing that NATO might do the same in Eastern Europe. On June 9, Assad met with American envoy Habib in Damascus and rejected his terms, demanding that Israel withdraw its forces from Lebanon as a condition for a ceasefire. US President Ronald Reagan called on Begin and Assad to accept a ceasefire effective at 6:00 AM, on June 10. By noon on Friday, when the ceasefire took effect, the IAF had shot down 82 aircraft without losing any in air combat. A year after the battle, a US fact-finding mission headed by Lieutenant-General John Chain, then deputy chief of staff for plans and operations, arrived in Israel to learn lessons on the battle.

The Soviet military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda announced that "sixty-seven Israeli aircraft, including modern US-made F-15 and F-16 fighters, were downed" in the fighting. The newspaper also reported a meeting with a Syrian airman who recounted an engagement in which he shot down an Israeli F-15: "The victory had not been easy; the enemy had been subtle". Even within Soviet ranks, these claims met with great skepticism. In 1991, Ivry met a Czech general who had been serving in Moscow in 1982. He told Ivry that the operation made the Soviets understand that Western technology was superior to theirs, and that in his view, the blow to the Beqaa Valley SAMs was an impetus to Glasnost and Soviet Union's collapse.