While Syrians celebrated the toppling of the Assad regime following a swift operation by rebel forces on Sunday, Israel moved in. The Israeli military launched half a dozen airstrikes on Syrian targets and parked tanks inside Syria’s borders, in violation of a 50-year ceasefire pact.
Israeli airstrikes on Sunday targeted apparent missile and chemical weapons stockpiles. Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the attacks were meant to keep those weapons from being used by “extremists.”
The Israeli military on Sunday evening positioned its troops near five Syrian villages within a demilitarized zone just to the east of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967 and later illegally annexed. The movement of its troops violates a 1974 ceasefire agreement with Syria, which Israel has argued is null since Assad’s government has collapsed — though the agreement was struck with his father 50 years ago. The Israeli military has also posted soldiers atop the Syrian side of the 9,000-foot Mount Hermon, which also falls within the ceasefire demilitarized zone.
The Israeli government said Monday that its military strikes and operations inside Syria were preemptive security measures meant to protect its citizens, intended to create a larger buffer zone between the two nations as the new Syrian government takes shape. A letter written by Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. Security Council said that this was a “limited and temporary” security measure.
“Israel is not interested in just and durable peace.”
But for those who live inside the occupied Golan Heights, where thousands of Syrian Arabs still live, Israel’s recent operations are a troubling sign of possible further military aggression to come.
“It’s a very negative indication,” said Nizar Ayoub, founder of Al-Marsad, or the Arab Human Rights Center in the Golan Heights. “It means that in [the Golan], Israel is not interested in just and durable peace, and eventually this will make the situation here more complex, and we will continue to live in a situation of war.”
Syrians in the Golan Heights, an area of just 700 square miles located near the borders of Palestine, Syria, Israel, and Lebanon, are often caught up in the crossfire of various conflicts in the region.
Ayoub, who lives in Majdal Shams, a village on the northeastern edge of the Golan Heights close to the borders of Syria and Lebanon, said the past year has been horrifying. Israel and Hezbollah traded rocket fire for months across the area. In July, a rocket shell struck a football stadium in Majdal Shams, killing 12 children and injuring 32 others. Israel and Hezbollah have accused each other of responsibility for the strike. Weapons experts have said the strike was likely an accident.
Ayoub said he is concerned similar attacks will take place with Israel’s new military position in Syria near the Golan. Throughout Saturday and into Sunday evening, Ayoub said he had heard bombings taking place in the Golan and in Syria.
Even though Ayoub said it is unlikely Israel is looking to permanently occupy new lands, given its ongoing genocidal war in Gaza and its bombardments in Lebanon, it is common for Israel to expand its borders during times of war. Israel used its 2006 war in Lebanon as a pretext for occupying swaths of Syrian territory for apparent security reasons, said Ayoub. At the time, Israel alleged Hezbollah had been storing weapons in homes along the Syrian border.
This expansionist drive has played out in Israel’s more recent offensives, such as in Gaza and Lebanon, where military operations have dragged on indefinitely in the name of security, displacing and killing thousands of civilians in the process, said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group.
“It de facto is currently part of its expansionist policies,” Zonszein said. Israel “has an ever-expanding definition of what security means, and defense, and an ever-expanding border. It has ever-expanding borders in Gaza, in the West Bank, now in Syria and Lebanon.”
Israel “has an ever-expanding definition of what security means.”
Zonszein said she did not think Israel had a premeditated plan to advance into new territory, and was instead scrambling to respond to a rapidly evolving situation following the rebel takeover of Damascus on Sunday. “But that doesn’t mean that things don’t evolve in ways that then become land grabs — there’s a pattern with how Israel is operating.”
During the 1967 war, Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria, alongside the Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Israel had formally annexed the land from Syria in 1980.
In a separate war in 1973, Israel further expanded its reach into Syria, but withdrew to the 1967 border and signed a U.N. pact that created a demilitarized border, known as the Alpha Line, between the occupied Golan Heights and Syria. Israel has been known to violate the pact.
In 2018, an investigation by The Intercept found Israel’s plans to expand its buffer zone deeper into Syria, well beyond the agreement’s borders. And earlier this year, The Associated Press found evidence of a large-scale construction process along the border, during which the Israeli troops had entered the demilitarized zone, violating the pact.
Israeli law governs the people of the Golan, and Israel controls the area’s water and has built settlements in the region, including resorts and agricultural operations. One such settlement established in 2019 is named Trump Heights, after Donald Trump, who during his presidency introduced a policy that recognized Israel’s control over the Golan Heights. Under Israeli rule, it remains extremely difficult for Syrians in the Golan to build new homes or buildings, or develop their land.
The U.N. and the majority of the international community, with the exception of the United States, reject Israel’s control of the Golan Heights, which is deemed illegal under international law. Last week, the U.N. reaffirmed its demand for Israel to end its occupation in the territory.
In the 1967 war, Ayoud and his family were displaced from the city of Quneitra in the southern end of the Golan Heights. When he and his family tried to return several decades later, there was nothing to return to, as Israel had destroyed much of the city. During the war, more than 80,000 people — 95 percent of the Golan’s Syrian Arab population — were ethnically cleansed from the area, according to research conducted by Ayoub’s organization, Al-Marsad. Syria’s government, at certain points, has tried to negotiate with Israel for the return of the Golan Heights. Ayoub said Israel’s recent violation of the 1974 pact feels like an additional obstacle toward such peace.
Even so, he said there is still a strong desire for an end to the Israeli occupation and for the Golan to rejoin the Syrian government. As for the fate of the Golan Heights and its residents, Ayoub said that decision should be up to the Syrian people.