Middle East crisis live: Israel bombards Syrian coastal region; at least 12 Palestinians killed in strike on Gaza school

The Kremlin said on Monday that no final decisions had yet been taken on the fate of Russia’s military bases in Syria and that it was in contact with those in charge of the country.

Four Syrian officials told Reuters over the weekend that Russia is pulling back its military from the front lines in northern Syria and from posts in the Alawite Mountains but is not leaving its two main bases after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia said on Sunday it had evacuated some diplomatic personnel in Damascus as well as Belarusian and North Korean diplomats via a special Russian air force flight from its Khmeimim air base.

Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 45,028 Palestinans and wounded 106,962 since 7 October 2023, the Gaza health ministry said on Monday.

Turkey on Monday denounced an Israeli plan to double the population living in the occupied and annexed Golan Heights as a bid to “expand its borders”, AFP reports.

“This decision is a new stage in Israel’s goal of expanding its borders through occupation,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, warning the plan would “seriously undermine” efforts to bring stability to neighbouring Syria after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The EU is sending a senior diplomat to Damascus to make contacts with Syria’s new Islamist-led leaders, in a further sign of western engagement after the fall of the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad.

The EU’s high representative for foreign policy Kaja Kallas said she had tasked a top diplomat to go to Damascus on Monday “ to make the contacts with the new government and people there”.

She was speaking ahead of a meeting of the EU’s 27 foreign ministers, who she said would discuss how to engage with Syria’s new leadership.

Syria, Kallas said, faced an “optimistic, positive, but rather uncertain future” and outside actors had to ensure it went in the right direction.

At the weekend the EU foreign policy chief took part in talks in Jordan with Arab leaders, Turkey and the US. Writing on X, she said they had agreed Syria’s future should be based on “stability, sovereignty, territorial integrity, but also respect for minorities, institution build-up and unity of government that includes all the groups in Syria”.

The United Nations intends to offer all kinds of help to the Syrian people, UN Syria envoy Geir Pedersen told Syrian rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa and caretaker prime minister Mohammad al-Bashir during a meeting in Damascus, according to a statement released by the UN envoy’s office on Monday.

Nesrine Malik

Last week, time collapsed. Bashar al-Assad’s fall recalled scenes across the region from the start of the Arab spring almost 14 years ago. Suddenly history felt vivid, its memories sharpened. In fact it no longer felt like history. Scenes that it seemed we would never see again – of crowds thronging the squares; the obscene riches of despots exposed, their fortresses stormed, their iconography desecrated – unlocked a familiar, almost sickening sense of possibility. Of giddiness, of horror at what fleeing dictators had left in their wake, and of hope. Syria’s long revolution – the death, torture, imprisonment and exile that Assad’s crushing of it unleashed – makes its successful end bittersweet. The price was so high, which makes its spoils even more dear.

The moment is also different in another way. In those 14 years, other revolutions across the region either unravelled or resulted in the retrenchment of dictatorial regimes under new management. And so that sense of untrammelled optimism that followed the fall of that first crop of dictators is tempered by some wariness of what comes next. But it can and should be a productive wariness rather than a reason for despair. Because what Syria benefits from now is an understanding of the fragility of this period. To those of us who experienced it before in other countries, it felt like a time when the momentum of revolution was unstoppable and cleansing. It had a kinetic energy that swept away the old systems to be replaced by new administrations, armed with good intentions and popular support, that would simply figure it out.

Read the full piece here.

A war monitor group said early on Monday that Israeli strikes had targeted military sites in Syria’s coastal Tartus region, calling them “the heaviest strikes” in the area in more than a decade.

“Israeli warplanes launched strikes’ targeting a series of sites including air defence units and ‘surface-to-surface missile depots’”, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in what it said were “the heaviest strikes in Syria’s coastal region since the start of strikes in 2012”.

In other news:

• Benjamin Netanyahu has said he had a “very friendly, warm and important discussion” with Donald Trump over the weekend about his plans in Syria and efforts to secure the release of hostages in Gaza. In an address on Sunday night the prime minister said he spoke to Trump on Saturday adding: “We discussed the need to complete Israel’s victory and we spoke at length about the efforts we are making to free our hostages. “We will continue to act relentlessly to return home all of our hostages, the living and the deceased.” A Trump spokesperson on Sunday declined to give further details about the call.

• At least 12 Palestinians were killed, including children, in an Israeli airstrike on a shelter for the displaced in Gaza’s Khan Younis school turned shelter for displaced Palestinians on Sunday, the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said.

• Syria’s de facto leader Ahmad al-Sharaa discussed with the United Nations envoy for Syria the need to reconsider a roadmap outlined by the Security Council for the country in 2015, the Syrian ruling General Command said on Sunday.

• Israel’s government approved a plan on Sunday to expand Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights it occupies, saying it had acted “in light of the war and the new front facing Syria” and out of a desire to double the Israeli population on the Golan. “Strengthening the Golan is strengthening the State of Israel, and it is especially important at this time. We will continue to hold onto it, cause it to blossom, and settle in it,” Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement reported by Reuters.

• Schools have reopened in Damascus as celebrations over Bashar al-Assad fleeing Syria continue.