Israel: We're not seeking U.S. intervention in Syria

Some Israeli officials and analysts suggested that Mr. Assad was testing Mr. Obama and that failure to act could send a signal to Iran that American threats were not to be taken seriously.

But Mr. Steinitz said the situations in the two countries were not comparable. Syria was engaged in a civil war with terrible humanitarian consequences internally; Iran’s nuclear program, he contended, posed devastating, even existential, threats to Israel and much of the region and world.

“It is problem No. 1 of our generation,” he said of Iran’s nuclear program, comparing it, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often done, to the threat posed by the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s.