Israeli soldiers and military vehicles cross a fence into the buffer zone between Israel and Syria near the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights on December 14, days after the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime. Photo / Heidi Levine, for The Washington Post
Damascus is pursuing a deal aimed at getting Israel to withdraw from Syrian territory it has occupied over the past 10 months and halt a string of destabilising attacks.
The details of any agreement remain unclear, raising concerns among some Syrians that the new government might concede too much.
Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa said in an interview with journalists and researchers in Damascus last week that a security agreement aimed at reversing the Israeli occupation could be announced in the “coming days”.
His Government is seeking the return of all the territory seized by Israel since December - though not a broader peace deal or normalisation of relations between the two states, which have been officially at war since 1948, he said.
After rebels led by Sharaa toppled President Bashar al-Assad late last year, Israeli troops swept into Ufaniya and other towns and villages in Syria’s southern provinces, breaching a 1974 ceasefire boundary and moving into a United Nations-monitored buffer zone inside Syria.
Since then, Israel, has carried out hundreds of airstrikes across Syria and erected military bases in the former buffer zone.
Human Rights Watch, in a report last week, said Israel was responsible for abuses, including the seizure and demolition of homes, arbitrary detentions and forced displacement of residents - a war crime - as it built its bases.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Government has framed the military campaign as defensive and aimed at protecting his country’s borders. Syria’s Government has not responded militarily, nor has it threatened to.
The contours of any agreement have been hashed out in a series of direct meetings between Israel and Syria, mediated by the Trump Administration, which has repeatedly expressed its desire to chart peace deals between Israel and Arab countries. The Administration has praised Syria’s willingness to explore an agreement.
Israeli officials, who have previously demanded a complete demilitarisation of areas south of Damascus, have sounded less optimistic than Sharaa about the negotiations, indicating they are unwilling to withdraw from some areas.
“We are holding contacts with the Syrians,” Netanyahu told his Cabinet. “There is some progress, but it is still far off.”
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, in a message on X, posted a photograph of Israeli soldiers on the summit of a mountain, with a caption indicating it was Syria’s Mount Hermon, in the buffer zone. “We’re not moving from the Hermon,” he wrote.
Some Syrians say they worry that Sharaa will go too far in offering concessions out of eagerness to please the United States, which has lifted some Assad-era sanctions on Syria.
They note that the new Government is in a weak bargaining position because of domestic unrest, economic distress, and Israel’s overwhelming military superiority.
“The fear is that, under the immense pressure of economic collapse, urgent need for sanctions relief and instability following recent violence … the transitional government might be compelled to offer sovereignty-related concessions that could constrain the country’s future,” Adnan al-Hamid, a prominent Syrian activist who is more commonly known by his pseudonym, Khaled Abu Salah, said in a text message.
“Such conditions raise a critical question: Is this the right moment for high-stakes negotiations about Syria’s sovereignty?” he asked.
“What Syrians seek is not a fragile deal driven by desperation, but a just resolution that secures the country’s integrity and reflects the will of its people,” he wrote.
The feeling of desperation is acute in areas occupied by Israel, where residents spoke not only about the weariness of war felt by people across Syria, but also the recent humiliations at the hands of the Israeli troops.
To make way for the new military outposts in the region, Israel had bulldozed parts of a forest in Jubata al-Khashab, residents said, and demolished at least 12 buildings in al-Hamidiya, according to Human Rights Watch.
In Ufaniya, the soldiers regularly set up checkpoints, residents said. Over the weekend, Israeli soldiers could be seen patrolling the town in open-topped jeeps.
In his courtyard in Ufaniya, Nasr Muraiwid recalled how his twin 18-year-old grandchildren, Mohammed and Mahmoud, were detained by Israeli soldiers three days earlier, in the middle of the night.
The soldiers appeared at the house around 1am and asked for the boys by name, telling the grandfather to call them to the house or he would be arrested instead.
When Muraiwid asked what the twins were accused of, an Arabic-speaking Israeli officer said only that the boys were “talking too much”. They would be released in two days, the officer said, according to the grandfather.
On Tuesday, the boys were still in custody, the family said.
The Israeli military, provided with the names of the twins, the time, date and place they were arrested, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the arrests.
A 62-year-old neighbour visiting the grandfather said Sharaa might be forced to sign a temporary truce with the Israelis to ease tensions in the region.
Syria was vulnerable, and “you cannot ask more from people”, said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fears for his safety.
In the interview last week, Sharaa said the current round of negotiations was not focused on the status of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria during the 1967 war.
He denied being pressured by the US to quickly reach an agreement, saying the Trump Administration was simply acting as a mediator.
For months after taking power, Sharaa seemed to treat Israel’s military intervention as an afterthought, rarely criticising it in public.
He was forced to reckon with the threat in July, when Israeli jets carried out airstrikes against Syrian government troops and buildings during sectarian fighting in the southern city of Sweida. Since then, he has repeatedly accused Israel of seeking to divide the country.
One of the strikes in July, near the presidential palace in Damascus, was “a declaration of war, not a message”, Sharaa said.
Speaking at a conference in New York on Tuesday, Sharaa said the talks with Israel were in “advanced stages” and that any agreement would “preserve Syria’s sovereignty and address Israeli security concerns”.
Dareen Khalifa, a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group who attended last week’s interview with Sharaa, said the Syrian Government believed it had little choice but to sign a security deal, given the “unknown” risks of even further Israeli escalation that could destabilise Syria’s Government.
Sharaa also felt he could not “afford to lose Trump or Barrack’s enthusiasm”, she said, referring to the glowing assessments of the Syrian leader offered in recent months by US President Donald Trump as well as Thomas Barrack, the Administration’s envoy to Syria.
Abu Salah, the activist, said that while Syria’s people were “exhausted from years of war” and seeking peace, it should not be “purchased at the cost of their legal and historical rights”.
- Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut and Alon Rom in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
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