“Your villages will be under our control,” the commander of Israeli forces told Hael Abdallah Abu Jehad, the sheikh of five villages located in Quneitra province — the usually demilitarized buffer zone along Syria’s border with Israel — by telephone.
“I was happy for the fall of Assad, but we couldn’t enjoy our freedom,” the sheikh recalls. “Not even 30 minutes had passed when I received the call from the Israelis.”
That same morning, the Israeli military advanced and occupied new tracts of territory in Syria, crossing a virtual border that had remained unchanged since the 1974 ceasefire agreement establishing a buffer zone between the two countries. The zone was created after Israel seized territory in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. Israel is now trying to take advantage of a new political earthquake in the region, provoked by the rise to power of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the initial weakness of the new government in Damascus.
After learning that their leader had left Syria, Assad regime soldiers abandoned military buildings that had served as observation posts along the country’s border. From snow-capped Mount Hermon to the Jordanian border, all checkpoints were taken over by Israeli forces. Although the region is small, its strategic importance is unquestionable. Just over 30 miles west of Damascus, the Golan Heights stretch between southern Lebanon, northern Israel and much of southern Syria.
“I started seeing the images of Gaza in my head,” says the sheikh, watching the sunset from the window. That night the Israeli military shelled roads and former Assad military bases. Merkava tanks penetrated Syrian territory, accompanied by soldiers and combat jeeps. Between Dec. 8 and Dec. 12, Israeli forces occupied several villages. “The hardest hit was Rasm al-Rawadi, where the population of the 30 houses was completely displaced and is now under Israeli control,” says Abu Jehad, behind his bushy, black mustache. “I was a fighter in 1967, I lived through all the wars since then, and they have never gone this far. But they’re not going to take us off our land now.”
Al-Hamidiyah was one of the Israeli targets. It is one of the largest villages in the area and the gateway to Khan Arnabeh, the heart of the governorate. At its center is a huge mosque with a green dome, visible to shepherds working in the fields. When I arrive, the streets are almost deserted. Suddenly, on one of the main avenues, I hear a chaotic sound: It is an Israeli Merkava tank performing maneuvers near a group of playing children.
Ahmad Ghannam, a 61-year-old farmer and the children’s grandfather, says that the Israelis “came to destroy Assad’s buildings, but they are also building new military bases.” The old man points off into the distance, where a group of yellow machines is on the move. “Now, the sheikh is trying to negotiate to prevent them from demolishing a neighbor’s house to let the tanks pass. He ordered Tareq [the neighbor] to stay inside, no matter what,” he explains, settling into his red and white keffiyeh. “They terrorize the neighbors, we are afraid. They impose curfews and checkpoints at every entrance to the village.” Dozens of families from among al-Hamidiyah’s 2,500 inhabitants fled to nearby villages or directly to Damascus.
Now the villages of Quneitra are disconnected. The Israeli army has destroyed the roads between them, and to enter the village from Khan Arnabeh one must make a long detour to avoid a Merkava that threatens anyone who approaches. Moreover, entering or exiting the village can only happen at set hours determined by the Israeli military. “There is a window during the day, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., but then during curfew, the Israelis patrol and restrain the neighbors,” says Abu Ali, a 55-year-old shepherd. “The biggest problem is with ambulances. If someone gets sick or has a problem, they can’t get in or travel long distances,” the man explains.
In one corner, four members of a family sip tea next to their house as they watch the grasslands at sunset. “We are very nervous and scared. Israel enters our houses almost every day looking for weapons,” says Samer al-Quatly, a 56-year-old farmer. A month into the occupation, “they are looking for five people allegedly linked to Hezbollah. During the night, they made us leave our houses from [midnight] to 6 a.m.,” he continues, indignant. “We were extremely cold, temperatures here are usually close to zero degrees. Even the children couldn’t stay inside to take shelter.” He wipes tears from his eyes as he finishes speaking.
The Israeli military also attacked the population. “A young man approached the new border line to pick up some belongings and an Israeli soldier shot him in the leg,” says Samer’s son Mahmoud, 28. In those days, Israel occupied about 10 houses, expelling about 40 people, who had to leave the village.
The absence of the new Syrian authorities has left room for uneven negotiations with the occupier. Hussein Khalifa, the 50-year-old village mukhtar, or local chief, tries to show that the situation is under control in front of the press: “Nobody left their homes here, Israel is only looking for weapons and some suspects,” he says, as bulldozers can be heard working in the distance. “No press is allowed here,” he adds. “Days ago we had a problem with a French journalist,” he says, referring to Sylvain Mercadier, who was in the area documenting the occupation when he was detained by the Israeli military and later released.
“I was violently arrested, gagged and interrogated after being clearly identified and approaching to interact peacefully with the soldiers,” the journalist told New Lines.
For his part, the mukhtar ends his testimony by saying that he is “very worried about the neighbors, they are suffering a lot and the new [Syrian] authorities are threatened if they are to approach here. We are alone,” he says sadly. “I see a very dark future for the people of al-Hamidiyah.”
In al-Hurriyah, a small, peaceful village, the Israeli military arrived on Dec. 10. They advanced from al-Hamidyah with about 20 soldiers, two jeeps and two Merkavas, breaking into the tranquility of the village. The commander, dressed in black, first asked to speak to the imam, the religious leader of the central mosque, and the mukhtar, 50-year-old Ahmed Ali Tahar.
The soldiers searched the entire village. They entered the mosque, using the loudspeaker to announce, in Arabic, that Israel was assuming command of the area and demanding that all citizens leave the town of 1,000 inhabitants. “You have until tomorrow at 10 a.m. to leave,” said the commander, who never showed his face. Only a few left their homes. “It’s just that we had nowhere to go,” says Tahar.
The next day the soldiers stood at the mukhtar’s house and demanded that he come out or “we will tear down the house with you inside.” Tahar came out with his wife behind him. According to the mukhtar, the commander raised a pistol and pointed it at him: “If tomorrow I find you here I will kill you first and then whoever else is here. You have until 3 p.m. to leave.” Over four days, the inhabitants of al-Hurriyah abandoned their homes to go to other villages. A few days later, some 600 people returned to the village, only to find most of their homes internally wrecked.
“We are aware of what is happening in Gaza, they want to do the same to us,” says Tahar.
Overlooking Mount Hermon is Hadar, a small, Druze-majority town with fewer than 12,000 inhabitants, in the Quneitra governorate. Tractors drive through the undulating streets among people dressed in traditional black-and-white garb. The village is about 3 miles from Majdal Shams, a city taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed by it in 2018 — a move only the United States formally recognizes after a decision taken during the first Trump administration.
The town’s mayor, Imad Hassoon, is deeply concerned. “We live between two wars,” he says. “Israel entered the city a few hours after Assad fell. They came to search the houses and ask us to hand over the weapons. We were outnumbered and alone in this, so we agreed.”
Although Israel has announced that the occupation is temporary, the mayor does not believe that the troops will withdraw. Some 31,000 Israeli settlers already live in the area alongside approximately 24,000 Druze. “We know that every plot of land Israel takes, it doesn’t give back,” he adds. Hadar is a strategic part of the Golan’s meltwater control, which makes its soil uniquely fertile in the region.
The mayor worries about the situation under the new HTS government. “We are unarmed and under foreign occupation,” he says. “Our village the last few years was under a lot of pressure in fights with the Islamist militias in the nearby cities,” with fighters from the previous reincarnation of HTS present in the region between 2013 and 2016. The mayor says the local Druze militias had no choice but to join Assad’s forces during the civil war to protect their community.
Now the people of Hadar face more immediate challenges. Israel controls most of the water resources in the surrounding area, and the town is isolated and has few fuel supplies.
On the border between Daraa and Quneitra lies the beautiful village of Suwayseh. On Dec. 25, the 600 inhabitants woke up to the sound of a Merkava advancing on their land. The Israeli army was pushing into occupied Syrian territories, having positioned itself on top of eastern Tal al-Ahmar after the fall of the regime. Without hesitation, more than 300 residents gathered to confront the occupation.
“They came with bulldozers to demolish the government’s military buildings,” says Sheikh Aadel al-Ali, a local. “But we decided to resist, this is our land.”
Suwayseh is a Sunni-majority village in Quneitra province, a region now located within the buffer zone. It is inhabited mostly by shepherds and farmers, but these days they are unable to farm because of the winter.
“We men went with sticks and stones to fight the war tank, we wanted to show that we weren’t going anywhere,” says the sheikh. Israeli soldiers were threatened by the euphoric crowd and responded with live ammunition. The tank opened fire with a heavy machine gun into the ground, but the bullets bounced off the stones dividing the grazing areas. The result was five young men wounded with finger-sized bullets.
“My son was shot through and through by a bullet,” says al-Ali as he points to his son, who is recovering in a bed. “I am very proud of him. I wouldn’t hesitate to offer all my sons as martyrs to defend this land.”
Ahmed Shteiwi, a 12-year-old boy who was hit by a bullet, suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage and was transferred to Damascus. His family was drinking tea in the arcade of their house in front of the crops. One of his older brothers, 26-year-old Jamil, says that “it was a collective resistance, we were all united, and now we are stronger, they aren’t going to take us out of this place.”
Saida al-Golan is located near the nexus of the Syrian, Jordanian and Israeli borders. It is a water resource hot spot; the Jordan River plays a central role for everyone in the region. The population of the small Sunni village reacted to the Israeli occupation in the same way as Suwayseh — by protesting.
Sheikh Meskin, 62, with a mustache and a red keffiyeh, says that nobody in the town suffered serious injuries but that the Israelis advanced without engaging in any dialogue with the locals. “Now they are building new checkpoints, nobody can get close because they shoot at you,” he says, pointing to an embankment in the distance. “They are hiding there, behind that row of earth, they knocked down all the trees to be able to observe better.”
In the nearby city of Daraa, a senior officer, Badr Abdalhamed, declines to offer any details on the stand-off with Israel. “We are looking for the construction of a new Syria and we don’t want conflicts with neighboring countries,” he says.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that he doesn’t seek a conflict with Syria. He nevertheless considers a settlement plan necessary to prevent threats from Syria and “terrorist groups near its border.” HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, Syria’s transitional president, has insisted that Syria is exhausted by the war and doesn’t seek new confrontations.
In Damascus, a civil society movement has been protesting against the Golan occupation. “They are stealing our resources and the new government makes measured statements,” says Tareq Abdelkader, a 44-year-old lawyer at the Hejaz railway station in central Damascus. “We must be thousands in the streets to demand that Israel withdraw from our country, it is an illegal occupation of which no country allied to Israel issued any word.”
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