A new chapter has opened in the Middle East with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday at a press conference in Jerusalem — his first in 99 days.

Speaking to reporters, he claimed Israel was defeating its enemies “step by step” in a “war of existence that was imposed upon us,” and cited Assad’s Syria as a “central element of Iran’s axis of evil.”

On Sunday morning, Syrian rebels took control of Damascus after a two-week lightning offensive, ending 13 years of civil war against the Syrian government and over 50 years of Assad family rule.

Netanyahu highlighted the billions of dollars Iran invested in keeping Assad in power and the regime’s cruelty against its citizens, noting it “massacred hundreds of thousands of its own people.”

Assad’s Syria “fostered hostility and hatred” toward Israel, attacked it in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, was “a forward post of Iranian terror” and a weapons pipeline from Iran to Hezbollah, he added.

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