On Sunday, Netanyahu branded the collapse of the Assad regime a “historic day in the Middle East”.
The Assad regime received much support from Hezbollah and Russia in the country’s brutal civil war. With Hezbollah involved in the Israel-Gaza war and cross-border air strikes between Israel and Lebanon, and Russia expending huge resources on its invasion of Ukraine, HTS, along with other rebel groups in Syria, were able to seize on the occasion and were ultimately able to capture large swathes of Syria.
During the 2011 Syrian uprising, Israel made the calculation that Assad, despite being an ally of both Iran and Hezbollah, was a better bet than what might follow his regime.
On Sunday, Netanyahu insisted Israel would “send a hand of peace” to Syrians who wanted to live in peace with Israel.
He said the IDF presence in the buffer zone was a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found”.
“If we can establish neighbourly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that’s our desire. But if we do not, we will do whatever it takes to defend the State of Israel and the border of Israel,” he said.
Israel is likely to be more sensitive over the Golan Heights, since HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani’s family has roots there. Thousands of Israeli settlers now live in the area alongside about 20,000 Syrians, most of them Druze, who stayed on after it was captured.
Israeli strikes in Syria are nothing new. It has previously acknowledged carrying out hundreds of strikes in recent years on targets in Syria that it says are linked to Iran and allied armed groups such as Hezbollah.
The Israeli strikes in Syria have reportedly been more frequent since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, in response to cross-border attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah and other groups in Lebanon and Syria.
Just last month, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, reported that a set of strikes hit a weapons depot and other locations in and around an area near Palmyra where families of Iran-backed militia fighters were, killing 68 Syrian and foreign fighters.