Ehud Barak Confirms Attack on Damascus Israel has implicitly confirmed it staged an air strike on Syria last week as President Bashar al-Assad accused the Jewish state of trying to further destabilise his war-torn country. The foreign minister of Damascus ally Iran, meanwhile, said he welcomed Syrian opposition leader Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib's stated readiness to hold talks with representatives of Dr Assad's regime. Four days after an air raid which Damascus said targeted a military complex near the capital, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak spoke to reporters in Munich but refrained from explicitly confirming that Israel staged the strike. Ehud Barak: Air-strike is proof that when Israel means business. Mr Barak told the Munich Security Conference on Sunday that it was "another proof that when we say something we mean it." "We say that we don't think that it should be allowable to bring advanced weapon systems into Lebanon, the Hezbollah from Syria, when Assad falls," Mr Barak said. Wednesday's air strike targeted surface-to-air missiles and an adjacent military complex believed to house chemical agents, according to a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Damascus has threatened to retaliate, further fuelling fears of a regional spillover of the country's 22-month conflict, which the UN says has already left more than 60,000 people dead. A fierce critic of both Dr Assad and Israel, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel of waging "state terrorism" as he condemned the air strike on Syria as an unacceptable violation of international law. We cannot regard a violation of air space as acceptable. What Israel does is completely against international law ... it is beyond condemnation," Mr Erdogan said. Following the strike, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said Washington was increasingly concerned that Syria's "chaos" could allow Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah movement to obtain sophisticated weapons from Damascus. Israel Defence Forces chief, Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, on Sunday started a visit to Washington with the Syrian conflict and Iran's controversial nuclear program on his agenda. And US Vice-President Joe Biden flew in to Paris for talks on Monday with President Francois Hollande, also covering Syria. In Damascus, Dr Assad accused Israel of seeking to "destabilise" Syria, state news agency SANA reported. The raid "unmasked the true role Israel is playing, in collaboration with foreign enemy forces and their agents on Syrian soil," he told Saeed Jalili, who heads Iran's Supreme National Security Council. Amid the insecurity, Israeli security sources said the Jewish state planned to declare a buffer zone inside the Syrian border to prevent radical groups from approaching its territory. "There's a plan in the military's northern command for the 'day after', according to which, when Bashar Assad is no longer president of Syria, there's a fear that terror elements will try to approach the fence," one source said. On the political front, key Damascus and Hezbollah backer Tehran also said it welcomed opposition chief Mr al-Khatib's overture for talks with regime representatives.