A First-Hand Account of Israel’s Illegal Occupation of Southwestern Syria

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“They came in the night after Assad fled,” said Mohammed, a resident of Kodena, a small village perched upon rolling hills of rocky soil, about a mile and a half east of the unofficial border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The Israeli forces “rode in jeeps, hummers, armored personnel carriers, Merkava tanks,” into the rural hamlet in southern Quneitra province, said Mohammed, who declined to give his last name out of fear of reprisal for speaking to the media.

The border is the “Purple Line,” a ceasefire line imposed after the 1967 war in which Israel conquered a slice of southern Syria, leaving the Jawlaan, the Golan Heights, effectively Israeli territory.

“They entered the village without discipline, firing machine guns, trying to scare women and families. One of their bullets went right through my water reservoir tank,” Mohammed explained.

“Once they had occupied our village,”—a quick operation, given Kodena is a tiny cluster of concrete one- and two-story houses—“they had the mosque’s custodian call on all males from 16 to 60 years old to come to the home of the sheikh,” to record their names and personal data.

“Then [the Israelis] took away their personal defense weapons,” largely outdated hunting rifles and pistols gathered over the course of a 13-year-long civil war that had ended only two days earlier.

In August, I visited Syria to report this story, after an absence of well over 14 years. I had last seen the country’s impromptu espresso-served-out-of-a-van businesses, its long-mustached, baggy-pant-wearing Druze men, and its half-built apartment towers in the Spring of 2011 as an Arabic language student and aspiring journalist in Damascus. While I was penning my first published article about the nascent Syrian jazz movement, protesters taking to the streets to demand reforms were encountering more and more violent repression, including in the Damascus suburb of Douma, where I taught English, where demonstrators were being fired upon directly.

After the overthrow of former president Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024, I knew I had to return to Syria to witness the historic events following his government’s fall. After all, I had left Syria just at the moment that the revolution that few Syria watchers thought could ever happen was beginning to take over cities and villages throughout the country. So I felt I must witness its sudden and unexpected conclusion.

After receiving repeated rejections of my applications for reporting funding, a colleague at a consulting startup asked me to go to Syria to collect data on housing in a city near Damascus. The colleague flew me to Syria via Turkey.

Three, I collected housing data and got to work finding a fixer and driver to take me to the area Israel had begun to occupy.

Since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, the Israeli military has quietly occupied a sprawl of land in southwestern Syria, setting up military bases and sending patrols within striking distance of Damascus. It remains to be seen whether Syria’s government will take meaningful action to regain occupied territory or relinquish more land to make good with Israeli backers like the United States, which has given largely unquestioning support for Israel’s conquests in the region, amid its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip

Before the 1967 war, Mohammed’s home of Quneitra Governorate was the agrarian and administrative heart of southern Syria, stretching across the volcanic plateau east of today’s UN buffer and anchored by the market town of Quneitra—now an abandoned, decaying municipality within the UN demilitarized zone. The region contained more than 160 villages and farms based on grains, orchards, and livestock. It served as the civilian hinterland immediately adjacent to the Golan Heights—a high plateau forming Quneitra’s western border and later occupied by Israel.

Before 1967, it was also socially diverse, home to Sunni Arab farmers, Druze, Circassians, Turkmen, and thousands of Palestinian refugees who had not long before been expelled at gunpoint from historic Palestine. This demographic mix resembled the wider Golan plateau but contrasted sharply with the post-1967 occupied Golan, where Israel’s depopulation campaign left only a small Druze minority in place.

When Israel seized the Golan Heights during the June 1967 war, most of Quneitra’s western plateau was emptied of its population, and more than 130 villages were destroyed, their lands absorbed into what became the Israeli-occupied Golan. During the Syrian civil war, Quneitra governorate fractured into zones held by rival rebel factions. At the same time, Assad-aligned forces retained only partial footholds, leaving many towns depopulated and governance structures weakened.

In December 2024, Israeli forces crossed beyond the UN-monitored buffer zone—established under the 1974 Disengagement Agreement that separated Israeli and Syrian forces after the October 1973 war—and advanced into parts of Quneitra Governorate, establishing new military positions and claiming the need to stabilize southern Syria.

Human Rights Watch later documented forced displacements, home demolitions, and restrictions on land access for civilians living in these newly occupied areas.

Today, the governorate is divided between Syrian-held villages pressed against the UN line and Israeli-controlled territory further west—a landscape shaped first by the erasures of 1967, then by a decade of civil-war fragmentation, and now by the 2024 Israeli incursion that has pushed beyond a frontier long considered militarily frozen.

“The Israelis [in Kodena] gave us assurances that they were not the army, but rather mukhaabaraat (intelligence services). The Israeli who told us this was named Captain Fet’hi, a Jewish Moroccan who spoke Arabic,” Mohammed said quietly, sitting on the terrace of a café in Damascus’ walled old city.

“He told us that they would not be staying in Kodena permanently. But we knew not to believe him. After all, they had immediately set up a base on the highest point in the area, Tell Ahmar El Gharbi, which had once housed Assad regime forces.”

“The Israelis built up the hilltop’s fortifications, built infrastructure, dug roads, installed surveillance cameras,” making Tell Ahmar El Gharbi a launching point for the invasion of surrounding villages throughout the entire area, Mohammed told me.

In the new base, Mohammed explained, the Israeli forces installed generators and pre-fab buildings to garrison soldiers. They roved through the village for the first three days, distributing baskets of building supplies.

But when villagers got wind of the Israeli forces trying to win hearts and minds, Mohammed and his friends protested.

“We rounded up the baskets, covered them in benzine, burned the whole pile, filmed it, and put the video on the internet, saying ‘We refuse any aid given by the occupation forces.’”

Kodena is where Anwar Al-Shibli, sitting next to Mohammed at the Damascus café during that initial meeting, was arrested by the Israeli forces perched in their base in Tell Ahmar El Gharbi.

“I was in the middle of the village in front of an elementary school,” he said months later over a choppy WhatsApp call from Beirut, where he had gone as an undocumented migrant to find work.

On that summer day of his arrest, he had his cell phone in his hand and was taking pictures.

Israeli soldiers on patrol in their Humvees surrounded him. Anwar said the soldiers told him they thought he looked like Mahmoud, a young man they had arrested earlier in the village for taking pictures of their base.

“They took my phone but found nothing dangerous on it.”

That didn’t stop them, however. After asking why he was in his own village, the soldiers tossed him into their trucks and took him up the escarpment on the newly dug road to their base.

The man translating to Anwar on behalf of the unit was an Israeli whom Anwar said was of Algerian descent, “the Captain.” The person is likely the same one Mohammed referred to as a Moroccan-Israeli, Captain Fet’hi, since their North African Arabic dialects are similar and may be hard for an untrained Syrian ear to distinguish. Anwar said they held him for interrogation at the base for around five hours.

“They put me in the Captain’s office in the base. There were about 15 to 20 of these soldiers huddled around the captain. They were asking me questions, then leaving the room, then coming back and asking me more questions.”

While the Captain questioned him, Anwar said, soldiers from the unit filmed him while the others joked and laughed.

Meanwhile, trucks came and went into and out of the base, the soldiers greeting each other.

Finally, the Captain ran out of questions, put the phone back in Anwar’s pocket, and let him go.

***

About 12 miles due north of Kodena, in the town of Khan Arnabeh, the streets were filled with pedestrians and motorcycles, and shops dangling goods outside their storefronts. The town, mostly Sunni Arab, hugs a small pocket on the UN demilitarized border.

Israeli forces invaded and very briefly occupied a small part of Khan Arnabeh after Assad’s government crumbled.

Past Khan Arnabeh, in a burned and abandoned government building inside the demilitarized zone in the hamlet of Medinet Es-Salaam, plaster, glass, and chunks of brick littered the stairs up to the second floor. There, I saw Hebrew-language graffiti scrawled in black spray paint, speckling the walls. Iconic red-and-white Coca-Cola bottles were scattered across the floor, their logos written in Hebrew script. By the looks of it, Israeli soldiers had garrisoned temporarily in the building, and perhaps, in boredom, scribbled slogans on the wall to let their replacements know not to get too comfortable, because the occupation would never be far off.

Further up, on the roof, more graffiti adorns the walls. Peeking over a low wall on the edge of the roof, one can see grey Israeli tanks on the edge of the village of Al Hamadiyeh, a mile and a half to the west.

Just two months before I visited the area on assignment with CounterPunch, Israeli units demolished no fewer than 15 civilian homes in Al Hamadiyeh during their ground incursion. The destruction uprooted multiple families and stripped them of shelter. The demolitions are part of a broader pattern of forced displacement accompanying Israel’s expanding presence in the area. Israeli forces have claimed the homes were close to a newly-established—and illegal—military base built inside the demilitarized zone.

And the pressure has only intensified since then. In recent weeks, Israeli tanks and infantry have pushed into other parts of Quneitra’s countryside — storming villages, erecting checkpoints, detaining residents, and bulldozing farmland and homes, according to local reports. This is a pattern that makes the demolitions in Al Hamadiyeh look less like an isolated episode than part of a widening campaign to reorder the borderlands by force.

Back in Khan Arnabeh, in the parking lot of a deserted playground, I met a Mukhtar, a local elected leader, who sported a mustache, dark glasses, and a shemagh headdress secured with a black ring atop his head. He is a member of Quneitra’s Provincial Reconciliation Council. He asked that his name not be used for fear of reprisal.

“The day after Assad fell, the Israelis came to me, and they said, ‘We came because of Hezbollah, because of Iran,’” the mukhtar said, referring to the powerful Lebanese militia group closely allied with Tehran, which supported and fought for the Assad regime against rebel groups inside Syria.

“I said ‘Fine. We’re tired of wars. And we have problems with Hezbollah. They’ve killed our young men.’”

“But if you’re coming to occupy our country,” the mukhtar said he told the Israelis, the wisps of his thin white shemagh flapping in the wind, “Our weapons are gone. But we still have the will [to fight]. And we have stones.”

The mukhtar talked about the infrastructure the Israeli forces are building to sustain what he believes will be a long-term, perhaps permanent, occupation.

He pointed to a mountain peak clearly visible in the summer blue sky, even though it lay some 16 miles north. The highest peak in the region, overlooking Damascus, Mount Hermon sits on the Lebanon-Syrian border, on the edge of the demilitarized zone. He said the Israelis are building roads up and down the mountain.

When asked if the Israelis were building roads between the occupied Golan Heights and Quneitra, the mukhtar stopped for a moment, counting on his fingers.

“Five roads,” he said.

“They haven’t built power lines yet, but they do call me, demanding that I call the Syrian electricity company to fix the underground power lines in the occupied villages. Same thing for the water lines.”

What smooths out the work in the mukhtar’s role as intermediary with an occupying power is that he speaks Hebrew, which he says he learned as a history student at the University of Damascus.

“I am a son of the naksa (The “setback” or “defeat” in Arabic), and I have ties to the Golan,” the mukhtar said, referring to the defeat of several Arab armies, including Syria’s, in the 1967 Six-Day War.“And I believed I would become a politician one day,” he said, before trailing off into thoughts on the formerly ruling Ba’ath Party. He seemed to indicate that Hebrew might be practical for a political leader in southwestern Syria’s border region with Israel—a forecast that turned out to be more accurate than he may have expected.

Only blocks away, in a sandwich shop, a shop owner spoke about the initial Israeli invasion of Khan Arnabeh after the Assad government’s collapse.

“They attacked all the military buildings in the town. They said they were looking for weapons, and jets bombed the buildings. They were all destroyed with airstrikes.”

Soldiers and tanks moved into the edges of town, leaving behind “massive destruction. They tore up the trees, broke up the roads.”

As for the villages like al-Hamadiyeh and others under direct Israeli occupation, the shop owner says they are lost to Israeli forces. “Any place Israel moves into, they don’t leave. They consider it theirs.”

And the state, he believes, will not be fighting for their return.

“Will the [Syrian] state fight them? I don’t think so. Will they take the land back in these circumstances? I don’t think so. It’s not the right time.”

Despite the minuscule distances along the border line, only a few miles can change everything. Less than eight miles north, in the village of Hadar, the land is more jagged and hilly, and the air is cooler at over 1000 feet higher. The village, according to locals, is nearly 100 percent Druze. This religious-ethnic group populates a section of Quneitra and, before the Israeli conquest and annexation, the Golan Heights across the buffer zone.

The Druze of southern Syria trace their origins to an offshoot of Islam that gradually developed into a small, closed religious community known for its strict ethical code and tightly guarded beliefs. For centuries, they lived in close-knit mountain villages where strong internal bonds and a clear distinction between religious elders and ordinary members helped the community endure shifting rulers and political upheaval. Today, in places like Hadar, that tradition of communal caution and solidarity continues to shape how Druze leaders navigate the uncertainty created by Israeli military encroachment.

In the vast living room of a concrete house perched on the edge of a rock outcropping, looking out over the demilitarized zone below, Hadar’s religious leader, or sheikh, sits with his legs folded beneath him on a cushioned seat. His black pants are wide and baggy, his mustache clean and jutting to either side, and he wears a white-woven cap with a flat red top.

The sheikh, who refused to be named or even to have his voice recorded, out of fear that he may face reprisals from the Israelis or the Syrian government, made it clear that his community had a much less adversarial relationship with the Israeli occupation than villages further south.

He noted that while the newly-installed government that succeeded Assad in Damascus has overseen sectarian violence against Druze communities in Syria since it came to power, the Israelis have offered to protect villages like his, given the fear many Druze have of their new government.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist movement that grew out of jihadist militias in northwest Syria and now leads Syria’s new government after spearheading the December 2024 overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, has concentrated power in Sunni Arab hands while largely excluding minorities from governance. Druze communities have borne some of the brunt of the new order, with Syrian troops and allied fighters accused of execution-style killings of Druze men and women during last summer’s bloodshed in Sweida province. Alawite areas along the coast have seen house-to-house raids and mass killings that a UN-backed inquiry and Human Rights Watch describe as identity-based attacks on Alawis. At the same time, Christians have faced harassment and attacks on their symbols, including fighters burning a Christmas tree in the majority-Christian town of Suqaylabiyah shortly after Assad’s fall, and the bombing of a Christian church.

With an Israeli health clinic set up in the demilitarized zone, the benefits of an amicable relationship for Hadar’s residents—who lack a health center of their own—are tangible.

According to the sheikh, the Israelis are concerned about their image among the Druze community, and perhaps the wider Syrian public. If negative local news about the Israelis in Quneitra is published, even if only on Facebook, the Israelis notice, the sheikh said.

“They visit me in this room here, and say, ‘Why is there bad news about us online? Why are you letting that happen?’”

A short drive through narrow lanes lined with low stone walls and small gardens, down the jagged hills from the sheikh’s home, Nabih Hassoun stands in the sunshine on the road that leads through the demilitarized zone up to the border with the Golan Heights. He is the village mukhtar and also acts as an intermediary with Israeli forces.

Around him, on the mountaintops rising from the scrubby fields, the domes of former Syrian military observatories can be seen poking into the sky. They now house Israeli military installations, after the observatories were taken over following Assad’s fall.

Nabih does not think the Israelis plan to stay long-term in Hadar, or that they plan to expand further into Quneitra. They are not even building infrastructure to do so, he said, contradicting the mukhtar in Khan Arnababeh.

Despite his status as mukhtar in Hadar, Nabih says he has no contact with the Israeli forces in the area, but only the Quneitra security administration down the road in Khan Arnabeh.

Yet at the moment he said this, several beige Israeli Humvees filled with soldiers, tailed by two black jeeps, passed within feet of him on the road. They did not stop or say anything to him or to me. This, despite the fact that they have arrested several foreign journalists who got too close, including those from powerful international outfits like the BBC.

Saying that Quneitra is part of Syria, to which he owes his allegiance, he said, “If the state is democratic and gives rights to its people”—something which the HTS government has not done much for its Druze population—“then we are with that state,” making it unclear whether he meant Syria or Israel.

As for the future, Nabih does not think the Israelis plan to stay in Hadar long-term or to expand further into Quneitra. They are not even building infrastructure to do so, he said, contradicting the mukhtar in Khan Arnababeh.

“There’s no proof they plan to stay. They’re not building infrastructure, or roads, or economic projects. Nothing that shows they are staying.”

But in the end, whether Israeli forces stay or not is not up to the people of Hadar, Nabih said. “As citizens, we are just looking for something to eat, for work. We can’t live full lives because there are no freedoms, no security… We aren’t able to expel Israel.”

If Israel decides to expand further into Syria, would Syrians resist?

“We have been disarmed. We can’t do anything,” Nabih said.

***

Less than four miles to the northeast, higher still in the mountains, is the town of Beit Jinn, in the foothills of Mount Hermon, only seven miles to the north. The small, mostly Sunni Arab settlement sits just outside Quneitra governorate, in the Rif Dimashq, or Damascus Countryside governorate.

Safaa, a young civil society activist in Beit Jinn who declined to give her full name, described the worsening Israeli incursions into the village and neighboring settlements. With screenshots of Google Maps she sent to me through WhatsApp, Safaa pinpointed an Israeli military fortification just outside Hadar, inside the demilitarized zone, that she said the Israelis built upon a spot called “Red Hill.”

“Red Hill is a former military outpost. When the Assad regime fell, Syrian soldiers left it, and Hadar’s people stole all its military weapons. Then Israel occupied this position,” she wrote to me in a lengthy thread of text messages.

The base is a staging ground for forays into the Syrian interior, Safaa said, and it has “a lot of Israeli soldiers and tanks with all the tools that they need.”

The Israeli army began by entering the area of Al Koroum farms to the south of Beit Jinn, which separates Beit Jinn from Hadar.

“Their goal was to enter into two military sites, which are Sahlat al-Wata and Jurat al-Luz, military posts that used to contain brigades from the former Syrian Army.”

But in an attempt to ease the potential for infighting following Assad’s downfall, the people of Beit Jinn entered the sites, took the weapons, and handed them over to the new Syrian government.

One of those military sites, Sahlat al-Wata, contained two tanks. The men of the village set up a checkpoint to protect the military sites and ensure the village’s safety.

“Then one night,” Safaa said, “The Israeli army arrived at the checkpoint and took the men’s weapons and telephones and told them to go back to the village.”

After the incident, the checkpoint personnel contacted the new General Security Department in the government, which instructed them that in the event of any further incursions, they should not retaliate, but instead allow the Israeli soldiers to do whatever they wanted in order to ensure their own safety.

So the checkpoint was dismantled, and the military sites were left unprotected. And on one of the following nights, Israeli Army forces entered the site of Jurat al-Luz, setting up explosives throughout the rooms, and excavated the entire place. They later entered Sahlat al-Wata and set up explosives on the tanks and the rooms in which Syrian soldiers used to live.

“And then they blew up everything.”

What followed, Safaa said, was a steady escalation through December 2025. Israeli patrols became “almost daily,” moving through the Al-Koroum area without entering Beit Jinn itself, stopping shepherds and farmers, checking identification, and questioning both men and women. The patrols then began pushing farther into the mountains, repeatedly ascending a ridge locally known as Bat al-Warda.

“The first time, they stayed for two hours. Then they withdrew. The second time, they stayed for one night and withdrew.”

The third incursion marked a turning point. After villagers asked why Israeli forces were entering the mountain and preventing farmers from reaching their land, the response was blunt. “They responded by saying that they had orders to carry out a mission,” Safaa said.

On the night of December 30, Israeli forces returned in strength, descending into homes in the Al-Koroum area with armored vehicles, dogs, and night-vision equipment. During the raid, soldiers came to arrest Mohammed Badee’ Hamadeh. His cousin, Mohammed Ahmed Hamadeh, a father of two suffering from a dissociative disorder, was sleeping outside the house under a fig tree, Safaa said. When he awoke, he panicked and began screaming, “the Israeli force opened fire on him,” she said, leaving him bleeding in the road as soldiers stormed the house, beat and detained relatives, and threatened to kill an uncle if the wanted man did not surrender. Mohammed Badee’ Hamadeh later died on the way to the hospital from severe blood loss.

By morning, Safaa said, seven men from Beit Jinn had been detained, and they remained in Israeli custody. Afterward, she said, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesperson, Colonel Avichay Adraee, publicly declared the raid successful in a public statement.

Two days later, the violence escalated again. After another arrest attempt triggered a clash, Israeli forces withdrew their wounded and unleashed hours of overwhelming firepower.

“Then the shelling began by all possible means—from warplanes, to artillery shelling from the Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon) observatory, to direct tank shelling on every location.” Drones fired missiles “at anything that moved,” while helicopters strafed the town until dawn.

When the bombardment stopped, Safaa said, residents surveyed what she described simply as “the massacre.” Thirteen people were dead, including entire families and a seven-year-old girl shot while hiding in her home. Homes lay destroyed, survivors fled to neighboring villages, and families searched desperately for news of detainees. Weeks later, fear still defined daily life in Beit Jinn. “We do not carry out any attacks against the Israelis,” Safaa said. “And we live in fear of a repetition of what happened.”

Nearly 40 miles to the south as the crow flies, past Khan Arnabeh and Kodena, just before the border with Jordan, lies the village of Kowaya. A mostly Bedouin village with a population of about 6,000, it sits on the verdant mountain slopes rising from the banks of the Yarmouk River, which divides Syria and Jordan.

Only two and a half miles east of the demilitarized border zone, Kowaya, in Dara’a province, has been the site of repeated incursions by the Israeli forces since Assad’s fall.

Hamada, a Kowaya resident, said of the Israelis, “The Israelis did get close to making it into our village once, on March 25, 2025. We confronted them with small arms fire. We had a popular movement led by the sons of Kowaya, who halted the Israeli advance. Six of them were killed. And behind each of them is a family.”

The invading Israeli forces used missile-armed drones and helicopters, Hamada said.

“Since [March], Israeli forces were never allowed to enter. Just yesterday,” he said in mid-November, “they infiltrated the village outskirts, and they fired their heavy machine guns. They do this every two or three days.”

“Israel attacks us almost daily. Last night they struck us with three shells. One fell only a few hundred meters from my house,” he said in a message in early December 2025.

Hamada said that the Israeli forces often try to enter the village with armored trucks, but when they reach the edge of the village, they run into conflict with the villagers.

“Our village will not accept this invasion at all. [The Israelis] entered other villages nearby, but never entered ours.”

While Israeli forces may not yet have penetrated Kowaya, Hamada said, they have established semi-permanent footholds nearby.

“They took over a military barracks called Theknet Al-Jazira, close to us. They have tanks there, artillery, and heavy machine guns,” he said.

“Just three or four days after Assad fell, Israel took over the strategic region of Al-Jazira. It was chaos after the fall, before the new [HTS] government gained control of the whole country. A few days after that they tried to exploit this chaos by expanding into the nearby villages, like Ma’ariya,” a little over a mile and a half to the west, near the buffer zone. “We know what they want—to expand their lands,” at the expense of Syria.

Amani, a young journalist in Dara’a province who asked that her name be changed for her safety, said that Syrians violently resisted Israeli incursions in a forest in Dara’a—a full seven miles inside Syrian territory.

“We had martyrs” from the confrontation, Amani said.

She noted that Syrian farmers whose lands lie along the fertile banks of the Yarmouk River, near Kowaya, have been prevented from entering their own farmlands.

“[The Israelis] have been shooting at farmers and have even arrested people from there.”

“In other places they set up new military posts, like in Ma’ariya,” a mile and a half from Kowaya, where Israeli forces built a checkpoint between the village and the neighboring community of Abedin, on the edge of the demilitarized zone.

Despite the incursions, Amani seems confident that Israel won’t be able to remain long-term in Syria.

Israel and Syria signed a disengagement of forces agreement in 1974, which led to the creation of the demilitarized buffer zone. And Amani believes Israel will eventually be forced to respect the agreement.

“In fact, the government is trying to force Israel to stick to the agreement, but in a political way,” she said. “Syria today doesn’t have the ability or the soldiers to start a war. So [Syrian president Ahmed] al-Sharaa is communicating with friendly countries to pressure Israel to stick to the agreement.”

Aymenn Al-Tamimi, a Syrian affairs analyst and translator based in Syria, likewise does not believe that Israel will stay long, or that it is planning to make southwestern Syria part of a “Greater Israel.” This, despite public statements by Israeli officials like Defense Minister Israel Katz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israeli forces would remain in southern Syria indefinitely.

“Israel had no intention to launch an incursion into Syria-controlled territory. That really only happened after the collapse of the Assad regime—which, to be fair, I think took most observers by surprise… The Israelis preferred the conflict [in Syria] be kept frozen, because Assad is ‘the devil you know,’” and not the devil you don’t.

He said Israel’s invasion plan was “formulated ad hoc,” with no long-standing plan to invade if and when the Assad government fell. Like most international observers, he believes that Israeli leaders thought the war in Syria had permanently stalled after 2020, with the country’s future to be decided through agreements between international powers.

“It’s almost like an overreaction to security concerns,” Al-Tamimi said. Though he noted that there are elements inside Syria that are actively inviting Israeli intervention, among them sections of the Syrian Druze population.

In July and August 2025, Syria’s Druze heartland in Sweida province was hit by a wave of sectarian violence involving clashes with Sunni Bedouin fighters and subsequent abuses by Syrian government forces and allied militias, leaving hundreds of Druze civilians dead and thousands displaced, according to UN investigators. The fighting drew external action, including Israeli air strikes on Syrian forces moving into Sweida, in a conflict that underscored the deep volatility of the country.

What happened in July has changed the sentiment of many Druze, some of whom may think they can no longer be part of Syria. “In southern Syria, the [Israelis] do talk about protecting and advancing the interests of the Druze community,” Al-Tamimi said, noting the existence of a lobby of Druze in Israel that has pushed for Israel to protect their co-religionists in Syria.

“Then there’s the carrot side, like setting up medical points outside villages”—like the one in Hadar—“or distributing aid to people. It has had an effect. It definitely has shifted sympathies towards Israel in a way that didn’t exist before [Assad fell in] December 2024.”

Israel’s actions in the newly-occupied territory in Syria, he noted, are mostly focused on finding people who have had links to groups that are hostile to Israel. Their forces have been searching for anyone with connections to Iran and Hezbollah, or ISIS.

“I actually know one guy who was taken by the Israelis—I think he’s still in Israeli custody now,” Al-Tamimi said. The man had been a member of an ISIS affiliate called Jaish Khalid. He fled to northern Syria, and eventually served in the general security apparatus of the new government.

“[The Israelis] raided his home in Jemla,” a village in Dara’a province abutting the buffer zone, “and took him and two others. I suspect what happened there is they got a tip-off from a local that this guy had been in ISIS.”

But not all the Israeli leads or information on the Syrians is correct, of course. Some tip-offs aren’t accurate, because villagers may be trying to take revenge on each other by accusing each other of a “crime” to the Israelis—essentially taking a personal dispute to an occupying power.

In Kodena, Mohammed’s village in southern Quneitra, someone told Al-Tamimi that “the Israelis have become like the new [Assad] regime security apparatus in that people go and inform on each other to the Israelis,” he said, referring to a similar pattern of score settling which relied on the brutal violence of Assad’s secret police, spies, and militias.

As for Washington’s role in facilitating or putting the brakes on Israel’s expansion and operations in Syria, Al-Tamimi seems to believe that the US, which is arming Israel’s forces, is simply allowing its ally free rein in the new Syria.

“I think Israel was going to establish these occupation and incursion areas, whether or not it was Biden or Trump [in the presidency]. Remember, this occupation started during Biden’s tenure. The fact that the US does not impose meaningful consequences on Israel for what it does in Syria allows Israel to continue with its actions.”

“Even the criticisms that are made by the administration are very mild, and there is no meaningful pressure to stop what it’s doing in Syria. I do not see any serious pressure on Israel in the near future to withdraw completely.”

I reached out to the State Department about the American role in Israel’s occupation of Syria. A spokesperson told me in an email that “Ambassador [to the Republic of Türkiye, Tom] Barrack continues to have regional discussions in his role as Special Envoy for Syria. President Trump has outlined his clear vision of a prosperous Middle East and a stable Syria at peace with itself and its neighbors.”

In my email to the Department, I noted that several Israeli leaders have publicly stated an intention to remain indefinitely in Syria. I asked if the US supports an indefinite Israeli military presence on Syrian territory, or if not, what actions it would take to bring such an occupation to an end.

“We cannot speak to Israel’s or Syria’s plans– we refer you to these governments,” the spokesman wrote.

Mohammed Fahad, a journalist with the Public Affairs Office in Quneitra’s Directorate of Information, said that while the Syrian government may want to end Israel’s occupation of Syrian territory, the Israeli military presence is simply too strong.

“There are nine [Israeli] military bases [in Syria]. They have armored vehicles and tanks. Each base has maybe one hundred soldiers, maybe more. They infiltrate with Hummers and civilian cars,” he told me in a string of voice messages.

He went on, “This government is planning to push out these forces from Syria. It’s joining in negotiations with the United States, Qatar, Turkey, Russia to sign a security agreement to expel the Israeli forces. But through battle or warfare? No.”

The Syrian government is asking the UN Security Council, and just about anyone who will listen, to help it remove the Israeli forces, Fahad said.

“The state can’t function unless Israel withdraws. There’s still weakness in the Syrian state’s security forces. They can’t work, especially in the demilitarized zone, because of the Israeli incursions.”

Little of this diplomacy at high levels is meaningful to Mohammed, living under the gaze of an Israeli military base in Kodena. Like the occupied Golan Heights within sight on the other side of the demilitarized zone, Mohammed believes his village may also be absorbed by Israel.

“We will become a part of Israel. If not, Israel will impose a guardianship on us, and we will be under Israeli security control. They will run things militarily and in security, while the families and civilians will remain in the villages.”

With Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza continuing almost unopposed—albeit now at the slower pace of starvation, exposure, or a sniper’s bullet—and its main sponsor, the United States government, doing nothing to stop its actions in West Asia, it may seem that its expansion in Syria cannot be stopped. While local acts of resistance from Syrians, like the villagers in Hamada’s community of Kowaya, are inspiring, without a unified, organized resistance, Israel will continue to implement the vision of a “Greater Israel” far beyond its current borders—an expansionist project even the UN condemns. And with the Syrian interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, seemingly recruited into the US “anti-terrorism” alliance, after his warm embrace by Trump and his advisors at the White House in November, it is unlikely that the new Syrian government will be challenging Israel’s occupation head-on.

So far, “the occupation hasn’t made a single positive move,” Mohammed said. “It is only escalating.” Israeli trucks and tank patrols, which once entered Kodena only once every two weeks, now roam through the village daily. They are reinforcing fortifications on Tell Ahmar El Gharbi, he said, and put up a brightly-lit Israeli flag on another high point nearby.

“Any agreements they may sign will only be ceasefires. But it’s just a matter of time—the only solution is war between us and Israel. Hopefully, we come out of that war with as few losses as possible. God willing, we get our land back.”

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