Peter Beaumont
The Guardian / December 16, 2024
Ankara says plan would ‘seriously undermine’ efforts to bring stability to Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
Jerusalem – Turkey has denounced Israel’s plan to double the population living in the occupied Golan Heights at the south-western edge of Syria as an attempt to “expand its borders”, as international concern grows over Israel’s actions in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime.
Israel captured about two-thirds of the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Jume War. Last week, it moved troops and armour into a supposedly demilitarised buffer zone beyond the land it already occupies.
Israel has said the new positions Israeli forces have taken in Syria are a “temporary measure”, but recent statements appear to have undercut that assertion.
Last week, Israel indicated that Israeli troops would remain in their new positions through the winter, while on Sunday the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced he had approved a plan to double Israeli settlement in the occupied Golan Heights.
“Strengthening the Golan Heights is strengthening the state of Israel,” said Netanyahu in a statement on Sunday evening, “and it is especially important at this time. We will continue to hold on to it, make it flourish and settle it.”
In a statement condemning the move, the Turkish foreign ministry said: “This decision is a new stage in Israel’s goal of expanding its borders through occupation. This step by Israel is a source of grave concern, taken together with Israel’s entry into the area of separation, in violation of the 1974 disengagement agreement, its advance into adjacent areas and airstrikes in Syria.”
The move would “seriously undermine” efforts to bring stability to Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s fall, the ministry added.
Israel declared in 1981 that it had annexed the territory. Most countries do not recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the land, though the Trump administration recognised the annexation in 2019. About 50,000 people live in the occupied land, half of them Jews and half Druze, an Arabic-speaking ethno-religious minority.
A ceasefire in 1974 that ended the 1973 October War established the UN-patrolled buffer zone between Israel and Syria to keep the forces apart, an agreement Netanyahu claims collapsed with the fall of Assad.
Israel’s plan to double the population of the main part of the occupied Golan Heights was also condemned on Monday by Germany, one of Israel’s closest allies in Europe, which called on Israel to “abandon” the plan.
Christian Wagner, a German foreign ministry spokesperson, said it was “perfectly clear under international law that this area controlled by Israel belongs to Syria and that Israel is therefore an occupying power”.
As Islamist-led rebel forces swept Assad from power last week, Netanyahu ordered troops to seize the demilitarised zone on the Golan Heights. Israel has also launched hundreds of strikes on Syria targeting strategic military sites and weapons, including chemical weapons.
Wagner said it was “absolutely crucial now, in this phase of political upheaval in Syria, that all actors in the region take into account the territorial integrity of Syria and do not call it into question”.
Speaking at a regular press conference, he added that the situation was “complex” and that Israel had an interest to ensure that the Assad regime’s weapons did not fall into the wrong hands.
But he stressed that Germany was “now calling on all actors in the region to exercise restraint” and that war-ravaged “Syria has been a plaything of foreign powers for far too long”.
Egypt also expressed its categorical rejection of Israeli government’s decision to expand settlements in the occupied Golan Height, considering the move a flagrant violation of the sovereignty and integrity of Syria’s territories.
The Turkish accusation came as Israel continued to pound former regime military assets in Syria. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Israel had hit missile warehouses and other former Syrian army sites along Syria’s coast in the “most violent strikes in the Syrian coast region since the beginning of the [Israeli] strikes in 2012”.
Peter Beaumont is a senior international reporter
