A Syrian activist who is visiting Israel said “we saw the Israelis are human beings and not monsters,” Ha’aretz reported yesterday.

The activist had been part of a network of health professionals who sought to secretly treat rebels and protect them from the government of President Bashar al-Assad. However, two years ago the network was exposed and his colleagues were arrested when he was abroad. “That is how I transformed from an activist to a refugee,” he explained

Since then, he has been aiding the rebels in receiving humanitarian supplies from outside Syria.

He claims that the Assad regime used chemical weapons no less than 26 times before the international community intervened. “It was especially vicious, since they sprayed the chemical weapons on days without wind and then disconnected the flow of water to the neighborhoods under attack – that is how they reached 100 percent killed,” he said.

As part of his work, he came into contact with an Israeli organization that provides humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees. “I asked why, why do they want to help us? In Syria they think that all Israelis want to kill us, that Israel wants to kick us out of our homes and take our land. But then we saw that it was our government that threw us out and who is killing us is our government, and then we saw the Israelis are human beings and not monsters and there is a diverse society here like in every country in the world,” he said.

The activist faults the international community for failing to help the moderate rebels, giving the extremists more power. He argued that the United States should establish no-fly zones or allow Syrians to defend themselves.

Since the Syrian civil war began, Israeli hospitals have treated hundreds of Syrians fleeing violence, sometimes even using cutting-edge medical techniques to treat victims of the civil war.

[Photo: WarClashes / YouTube ]