Prehistory The
Venus of Berekhat Ram, a pebble from the
Lower Paleolithic era found in the Golan Heights, may have been carved by
Homo erectus between 700,000 and 230,000 BCE.
Bronze Age The southern Golan saw a rise in settlements from the 2nd millennium BCE onwards. These were small settlements located on the slopes overlooking the
Sea of Galilee or nearby gorges. They may correspond to the "
cities of the Land of Ga[šu]ru" mentioned in
Amarna Letter #256.5, written by the prince of Pihilu (
Pella). This suggests a different form of political organization compared to the prevalent city-states of the region, such as
Hatzor to the west and
Ashteroth to the east.
Iron Age Following the
Late Bronze Age collapse, the kingdom of
Geshur emerged from the Golan, likely a continuation of the earlier "
Land of Garu". The
Hebrew Bible mentions it as a distinct entity during the reign of
David (10th century BCE). David's marriage to Maacha, daughter of
Talmai, the king of Geshur, supports a dynastic alliance with Israel. However, by the mid-9th century BCE,
Aram-Damascus absorbed Geshur into its expanding territory. Aram-Damascus' rivalry with the
Kingdom of Israel led to numerous military clashes in the Golan and Gilead regions throughout the 9th and 8th centuries BCE. In the
Books of Kings (1 Kings 20:26–30), the Bible recounts how
Ahab, king of Israel, defeated
Ben-Hadad I of Damascus at
Aphek, a location possibly corresponding to the modern-day
Afik, near the Sea of Galilee.
Hellenistic and early Roman periods at
Banias and the white-domed shrine of Nabi
Khadr in the background The Golan Heights, along with the rest of the region, came under the control of
Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, following the
Battle of Issus. Following Alexander's death, the Golan came under the domination of the Macedonian general
Seleucus and remained part of the
Seleucid Empire for most of the next two centuries. In the middle of the 2nd century BCE,
Itureans moved into the Golan, occupying more than one hundred locations in the region. Iturean stones and pottery have been found in the area. Itureans also built several temples, one of them in function up until the Islamic conquest. Around 83–81 BCE, the Golan was captured by the Hasmonean king and high priest
Alexander Jannaeus, annexing the area to the
Hasmonean kingdom of Judaea. Following this conquest, the Hasmoneans encouraged Jewish migrants from
Judea to settle in the Golan. Most scholars agree that this settlement began after the Hasmonean conquest, though it might have started earlier, Over the next century, Jewish settlement in the Golan and nearby regions became widespread, reaching north to
Damascus and east to
Naveh. Following Herod's death in 4 BCE, Augustus Caesar adjudicated that the Golan fell within the
Tetrarchy of Herod's son,
Herod Philip I. It housed one of the earliest known
synagogues, believed to have been constructed in the late 1st century BC, while the
Temple in Jerusalem was still standing. After Philip's death in 34 CE, the
Romans absorbed the Golan into the province of
Syria, but
Caligula restored the territory to Herod's grandson
Agrippa in 37. Following Agrippa's death in 44, the Romans again annexed the Golan to Syria, promptly to return it again when
Claudius granted control of the Golan to
Agrippa II, the son of Agrippa I, in 53. By the time of the
Great Jewish revolt, which began in 66 CE, part of the Golan Heights was predominantly inhabited by Jews. According to the account of
Josephus, the western and central Golan were densely populated with cities that emerged on fertile stony soil. Despite nominally being under Agrippa's control and situated outside the
province of Judaea, the Jewish communities in the area participated in the revolt. Initially, Gamla was loyal to Rome, but later the town switched allegiance and even minted its own revolt coins. Josephus, who was appointed by the
provisional government in
Jerusalem as commander of Galilee, fortified the cities of Sogana, Seleucia, and Gamla in the Golan. From 93 CE, the
Paneas region forming the north of the Golan belonged to the province of
Phoenice. Based on
Ptolemy's
Geography (), the western portions of the Golan, including the regions of
Hippos and Gaulanitis, were part of
Syria Palaestina, the new province which replaced
Judaea after Bar Kokhba's revolt. The eastern parts belong to the province of
Arabia Petraea, established in 106 CE. By the close of the second century,
Judah ha-Nasi was granted a lease for 2,000 units of land in the Golan.
Late Roman and Byzantine periods In the
later Roman and
Byzantine periods, the area was administered as part of
Phoenicia Prima and
Syria Palaestina, and finally Golan/Gaulanitis was included together with
Peraea in
Palaestina Secunda, after 218 CE. The Golan preserves a notable group of
Diocletianic boundary stones, which document village demarcations from the late third and early fourth centuries CE. The political and economic recovery of
Palestine during the reigns of
Diocletian and
Constantine, in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries CE, led to a resurgence of Jewish life in the Golan. Excavations at various synagogue sites have uncovered ceramics and coins that provide evidence of this resettlement. During this period, several
synagogues were constructed, and today 25 locations with ancient synagogues or their remnants have been discovered, all situated in the central Golan. These synagogues, built from the abundant
basalt stones of the region, were influenced by those in the Galilee but exhibited their own distinctive characteristics; prominent examples include
Umm el-Qanatir,
Qatzrin and
Deir Aziz. They were initially nomadic but gradually became semi-sedentary, The Ghassanids had adopted
Monophysitism in the 5th century. In 377 CE, a sanctuary for
John the Baptist was established in the Golan village of
Er-Ramthaniyye. The sanctuary was often visited by the Ghassanids. and local synagogues may have been funded by the prosperous production of olive oil. The Ghassanids were able to hold on to the Golan until the
Sassanid invasion of 614. Following a brief restoration under the Emperor
Heraclius, the Golan again fell, this time to the invading Muslim Arabs after the
Battle of the Yarmuk in 636. Data from surveys and excavations combined show that the bulk of sites in the Golan were abandoned between the late 6th and early 7th century as a result of military incursions, the breakdown of law and order, and the economy brought on by the weakening of the Byzantine rule. Some settlements lasted till the end of the Umayyad era. Following it, there was a brief period of greatly diminished occupation during the
Abbasid period (approximately 750–878). Jewish communities persisted at least into the Middle Ages in the towns of
Fiq in the southern Golan and
Nawa in Batanaea.
Crusader/Ayyubid period , built by the
Ayyubids and hugely enlarged by the
Mamluks During the
Crusades, the Golan's elevated terrain posed a significant challenge to the Crusader armies, although the Crusader forces held the strategically important town of
Banias twice, in 1128–32 and 1140–64. After victories by Sultan
Nur ad-Din Zangi, it was the
Kurdish dynasty of the
Ayyubids under Sultan
Saladin who ruled the area. The
Mongols swept through in 1259, but were driven off by the
Mamluk commander and future
sultan Qutuz at the
Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260.
Ottoman period map, signed 8 May 1916, showing the Golan Heights in area "A", an independent Arab state in the French sphere of influence In the 16th century, the
Ottoman Turks conquered Syria. During this time, the Golan formed part of the
Hauran Sanjak. During the 1560s, Ottoman official
Mustafa Lala Pasha established
al-Qunaytira as an important regional center, building a
caravanserai, a mosque and shops, and endowing them with properties in dozens of villages around the Golan. Some
Druze communities were established in the Golan during the 17th and 18th centuries. The villages were abandoned during previous periods due to raids by Bedouin tribes were not resettled until the second half of the 19th century. In 1868, the region was described as "almost entirely desolate". According to a travel handbook of the time, only 11 of 127 ancient towns and villages in the Golan were inhabited. By the late 19th century, the Golan Heights was mostly inhabited by
Arabs,
Turkmen and
Circassians. The Circassians, part of a large influx of refugees from the
Caucasus into the empire as a result of the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, were encouraged to settle in the Golan by the Ottoman authorities. They were granted lands with a 12-year tax exemption. The Al Fadl, the Druze and the Circassians were often in conflict for local dominance. These struggles subsided with the Ottoman government's formal recognition of the Al Fadl's tribal territory and pasturelands in the Golan, which were invested in the name of the tribe's emir. The emir relocated to Damascus and collected rents from his tribesmen who thereafter settled in the area and engaged in a combination of farming and pastoralism. The tribe settled in several villages in the area and controlled important roads to Damascus, Galilee and Lebanon. In the 19th century the tribe continued to expand their territory in the Golan and built two palaces. and they supported the
uprising against the French in the northern Golan.
Modern Jewish settlement In 1880,
Laurence Oliphant published '''' (The Land of
Gilead), which described a plan for large-scale Jewish settlement in the Golan. In 1884, there were still open stretches of uncultivated land between villages in the lower Golan, but by the mid-1890s most were owned and cultivated. Some land had been purchased in the Golan and
Hawran by Zionist associations based in Romania, Bulgaria, the United States and England, in the late 19th century and early 20th century. In the winter of 1885, members of the
Old Yishuv in
Safed formed the Beit Yehuda Society and purchased of land from the village of Ramthaniye in the central Golan. Soon afterwards, the society regrouped and purchased of land from the village of Bir e-Shagum on the western slopes of the Golan. The village they established,
Bnei Yehuda, existed until 1920. The last families left in the wake of the
Passover riots of 1920. --> Between 1891 and 1894, Baron
Edmond James de Rothschild purchased around of land in the Golan and the Hawran for Jewish settlement. Between 1904 and 1908, a group of
Crimean Jews settled near the Arab village of
al-Butayha in the
Bethsaida Valley, initially as tenants of a Kurdish proprietor with the prospects of purchasing the land, but the arrangement faltered. Jewish settlement in the region dwindled over time, due to Arab hostility, Turkish bureaucracy, disease and economic difficulties. In 1921–1930, during the French Mandate, the
Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA) obtained the deeds to the Rothschild estate and continued to manage it, collecting rents from the Arab peasants living there. The boundary between the forthcoming British and French mandates was defined in broad terms by the
Franco-British Boundary Agreement of December 1920. That agreement placed the bulk of the Golan Heights in the French sphere. The treaty also established a joint commission to settle the precise details of the border and mark it on the ground. In accordance with the same process, a nearby parcel of land that included the ancient site of
Tel Dan and the
Dan spring were transferred from Syria to Palestine early in 1924. The Golan Heights, including the spring at
Wazzani and the one at
Banias, became part of
French Syria, while the Sea of Galilee was placed entirely within British Mandatory Palestine. When the French Mandate for Syria ended in 1944, the Golan Heights became part of the newly independent state of Syria and was later incorporated into
Quneitra Governorate.
Border incidents after 1948 After the 1948–49
Arab–Israeli War, the Golan Heights was partly demilitarized by the
Israel-Syria Armistice Agreement. During the following years, the area along the border witnessed thousands of violent incidents; the armistice agreement was being violated by both sides. The underlying causes of the conflict were a disagreement over the legal status of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), cultivation of land within it and competition over water resources. Syria claimed that neither party had sovereignty over the DMZ. Israel contended that the Armistice Agreement dealt solely with military concerns and that it had political and legal rights over the DMZ. Israel wanted to assert control up to the boundary established in the 1923
Paulet–Newcombe Agreement in order to claim the
Hula swamp, gain exclusive rights to Lake Galilee and divert water from the Jordan for its
National Water Carrier. During the 1950s, Syria registered two principal territorial accomplishments: it took over
Al Hammah enclosure south of
Lake Tiberias and established a
de facto presence on and control of the eastern shore of the lake. Palestinian refugees were denied the
right of return or compensation, and because of this they started raids on Israel. The Syrian government supported the Palestinian attacks because of Israel taking over more land in the DMZ. In July 1966,
Fatah began raids into Israeli territory, with active support from Syria. At first the militants entered via Lebanon or Jordan, but those countries made concerted attempts to stop them and raids directly from Syria increased. Israel's response was a series of retaliatory raids, of which the largest were an attack on the Jordanian village of Samu in November 1966. In April 1967, after Syria heavily shelled Israeli villages from the Golan Heights, Israel shot down six Syrian
MiG fighter planes and warned Syria against future attacks. The Israelis used to send tractors with armed police into the DMZ, which prompted Syria firing at Israel. In October 1966 Israel brought the matter up before the United Nations. Five nations sponsored a resolution criticizing Syria for its actions but it failed to pass. No Israeli civilian was killed in half a year leading up to the Six-Day War and the Syrian attacks have been called "largely symbolic". Israeli incursions into the zone were responded to with Syrians shooting. Israel in turn would retaliate with military force. The provocation was sending a tractor to plow in the demilitarized areas to get the Syrians to attack. The Syrians responded by firing at the tractors and shelling
Israeli settlements. Jan Mühren, a former UN observer in the area at the time, told a Dutch current affairs programme that Israel "provoked most border incidents as part of its strategy to annex more land". UN officials blamed both Israel and Syria for destabilizing the borders.
Six-Day War and Israeli occupation After the Six-Day War broke out in June 1967, Syria began shelling towns in Israel's north, which was disregarded for the first few days of the war, until the
Israel Defense Forces captured the Golan Heights on
9–10 June. The area that came under Israeli control as a result of the war consists of two geologically distinct areas: the Golan Heights proper, with a surface of , and the slopes of the Mount Hermon range, with a surface of . The new ceasefire line was named the
Purple Line. In the Golan Heights’ battle, 115 Israelis were killed and 306 wounded. An estimated 2,500 Syrians were killed, with another 5,000 wounded. During the war, between 80,000 and 131,000 Israeli sources and the
U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants reported that much of the local population of 100,000 fled as a result of the war, whereas the Syrian government stated that a large proportion of it was expelled. Among those forced out was the Fadl tribe. Israel has disallowed former residents to return, citing security reasons. The remaining villages were
Majdal Shams,
Shayta (later destroyed),
Ein Qiniyye,
Mas'ade,
Buq'ata and, outside the Golan proper,
Ghajar. under Israeli occupation, 1969. Israeli settlement in the Golan began soon after the war.
Merom Golan was founded in July 1967, and by 1970, there were 12 settlements. Construction of
Israeli settlements began in the remainder of the territory held by Israel, which was under military administration until 1981, when Israel passed the
Golan Heights Law extending
Israeli law and administration throughout the territory. On 19 June 1967, the Israeli cabinet voted to return the Golan to Syria in exchange for a peace agreement, although this was rejected after the
Khartoum Resolution of 1 September 1967. In the 1970s, as part of the
Allon Plan, Israeli politician
Yigal Allon proposed that a
Druze state be established in Syria's
Quneitra Governorate, including the Israeli-held Golan Heights. Allon died in 1980 and his plan never materialised.
Yom Kippur War During the
Yom Kippur War in 1973, Syrian forces overran much of the southern Golan, before being pushed back by an Israeli counterattack. Israel and Syria signed a ceasefire agreement in 1974 that left almost all the Heights in Israeli hands. The agreement delineated a
demilitarized zone along the border and limited the number of forces each side can deploy within of the zone. In the aftermath of the war and under the terms of
United Nations Security Council Resolution 350, the
United Nations Disengagement Observer Force was assigned responsibility to oversee the demilitarized zone. East of the 1974 ceasefire line, lies the Syrian controlled part of the Heights, an area covering that was not captured by Israel or that they had not withdrawn from. This area forms 30% of the Golan Heights. Today, it contains more than 40 Syrian towns and villages. In 1975, following the 1974 ceasefire agreement, Israel returned a narrow demilitarized zone to Syrian control. Some of the displaced residents started to return to their homes there, supported by the Syrian government’s rebuilding efforts, except for
Quneitra. In the mid-1980s, the Syrian government launched "The Project for the Reconstruction of the Liberated Villages". By the end of 2007, the population of the
Quneitra Governorate was estimated at 79,000. Mines deployed by the Syrian army remain active. , there had been at least 216 landmine casualties in the Syrian-controlled Golan since 1973, of which 108 were fatalities.
Annexation by Israel On 14 December 1981, Israel passed the
Golan Heights Law, The Golan Heights Law was declared "null and void and without international legal effect" by
United Nations Security Council Resolution 497, which also demanded that Israel rescind its decision. The UN representative for the United Kingdom, responsible for negotiating and drafting the Security Council resolution, said that the actions of the Israeli Government in establishing settlements and colonizing the Golan are in clear defiance of Resolution 242. Syria continued to demand a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, including a strip of land on the east shore of the
Sea of Galilee that Syria captured during the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli War and occupied from 1949 to 1967. Successive Israeli governments have considered an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan in return for normalization of relations with Syria, provided certain security concerns are met. Prior to 2000, Syrian president
Hafez al-Assad rejected normalization with Israel. Since the passing of the
Golan Heights Law, Israel has treated the Israeli-occupied portion of the Golan Heights as a subdistrict of its
Northern District. The largest locality in the region is the Druze village of Majdal Shams, which is at the foot of Mount Hermon, while
Katzrin is the largest
Israeli settlement. The region covers . The plan for the creation of the settlements, which had initially begun in October 1967 with a request for a regional agricultural settlement plan for the Golan, was formally approved in 1971 and later revised in 1976. The plan called for the creation of 34 settlements by 1995, one of which would be an urban center, Katzrin, and the rest rural settlements, with a population of 54,000, among them 40,000 urban and the remaining rural. By 1992, 32 settlements had been created, among them one city and two regional centers. The population total had however fallen short of Israel's goals, with only 12,000 Jewish inhabitants in the Golan settlements in 1992.
Municipal elections in Druze towns In 2016, a group of Druze lawyers petitioned the
Supreme Court of Israel to allow elections for
local councils in the Golan Druze towns of
Majdal Shams,
Buq'ata,
Mas'ade, and
Ein Qiniyye, replacing the previous system in which their members were appointed by the national government. On 3 July 2017, the
Interior Ministry announced those towns would be included in the
2018 Israeli municipal elections. The turnout was just over 1% with Druze religious leaders telling community members to boycott the elections or face shunning. The UN Human Rights Council issued a Resolution on Human Rights in the Occupied Syrian Golan on 23 March 2018 that included the statement "Deploring the announcement by the Israeli occupying authorities in July 2017 that municipal elections would be held on 30 October 2018 in the four villages in the occupied Syrian Golan, which constitutes another violation to international humanitarian law and to relevant Security Council resolutions, in particular resolution 497 (1981)".
Israeli–Syrian peace negotiations During United States-brokered negotiations in 1999–2000, Israel and Syria discussed a peace deal that would include Israeli withdrawal in return for a comprehensive peace structure, recognition and full normalization of relations. The disagreement in the final stages of the talks was on access to the Sea of Galilee. Israel offered to withdraw to the pre-1948 border (the
1923 Paulet-Newcombe line), while Syria insisted on the 1967 frontier. The former line has never been recognised by Syria, claiming it was imposed by the colonial powers, while the latter was rejected by Israel as the result of Syrian aggression. While the difference between the lines is less than for the most part, the 1967 line would give Syria access to the Sea of Galilee, and Israel wished to retain control of the Sea of Galilee, its only freshwater lake and a major water resource. Clinton also laid blame on Israel, as he said after the fact in his autobiography
My Life. are dispatched to
Mount Hermon. In June 2007, it was reported that Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert had sent a secret message to Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad saying that Israel would concede the land in exchange for a comprehensive peace agreement and the severing of Syria's ties with Iran and militant groups in the region. On the same day, former Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the former Syrian President,
Hafez al-Assad, had promised to let Israel retain
Mount Hermon in any future agreement. In April 2008, Syrian media reported
Turkey's Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had told President Bashar al-Assad that Israel would withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for peace. Israeli leaders of communities in the Golan Heights held a special meeting and stated: "all construction and development projects in the Golan are going ahead as planned, propelled by the certainty that any attempt to harm Israeli sovereignty in the Golan will cause severe damage to state security and thus is doomed to fail". A 2008 survey found that 70% of Israelis oppose relinquishing the Golan for peace with Syria. In 2008, a plenary session of the
United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution 161–1 in favour of a motion on the Golan Heights that reaffirmed
UN Security Council Resolution 497 and called on Israel to desist from "changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and legal status of the occupied Syrian Golan and, in particular, to desist from the establishment of settlements [and] from imposing Israeli citizenship and Israeli identity cards on the Syrian citizens in the occupied Syrian Golan and from its repressive measures against the population of the occupied Syrian Golan." Israel was the only nation to vote against the resolution. In May 2009, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that returning the Golan Heights would turn it into "Iran's front lines which will threaten the whole state of Israel". He said: "I remember the Golan Heights without
Katzrin, and suddenly we see a thriving city in the
Land of Israel, which having been a gem of the
Second Temple era has been revived anew." American diplomat
Martin Indyk said that the 1999–2000 round of negotiations began during Netanyahu's first term (1996–1999), and he was not as hardline as he made out. In March 2009, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad claimed that indirect talks had failed after Israel did not commit to full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. In August 2009, he said that the return of the entire Golan Heights was "non-negotiable", it would remain "fully Arab", and would be returned to Syria. In June 2009, Israeli President
Shimon Peres said that Assad would have to negotiate without preconditions, and that Syria would not win territorial concessions from Israel on a "silver platter" while it maintained ties with Iran and Hezbollah. In response, Syrian Foreign Minister
Walid Muallem demanded that Israel unconditionally cede the Golan Heights "on a silver platter" without any preconditions, adding that "it is our land," and blamed Israel for failing to commit to peace. Syrian President Assad claimed that there was "no real partner in Israel". In 2010, Israeli foreign minister
Avigdor Lieberman said: "We must make Syria recognise that just as it relinquished its dream of a greater Syria that controls Lebanon ... it will have to relinquish its ultimate demand regarding the Golan Heights."
Syrian civil war report about how Golan Druze were affected by the
Syrian civil war From 2012 to 2018 in the
Syrian civil war, the eastern Golan Heights became a scene of repeated battles between the
Syrian Army, rebel factions of the
Syrian opposition including the moderate
Southern Front and jihadist
al-Nusra Front, and
factions affiliated with the
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group. The atrocities of the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIL, which from 2016 to 2018 controlled parts of the Syrian-administered Golan, added a new twist to the issue. In 2015, it was reported that Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu asked US President
Barack Obama to recognize Israeli claims to the territory because of these recent ISIL actions and because he said that modern Syria had likely "disintegrated" beyond the point of reunification. The
White House dismissed Netanyahu's suggestion, stating that President Obama continued to support UN resolutions 242 and 497, and any alterations of this policy could strain American alliances with Western-backed Syrian rebel groups. In 2016, the
Islamic State apologized to Israel after a firefight with Israeli soldiers in the area. After the
April 2018 missile strikes against Syria by the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, a group of about 500
Druze in the Golan Heights town of
Ein Qiniyye marched in support of Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad on Syria's
Independence Day and in condemnation of the American-led strikes. In May 2018, after 20 Iranian rockets were launched at Israeli army positions in the western Golan Heights, the first direct attack by Iran against Israeli forces, the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched
Operation House of Cards, a series of "extensive" air strikes against
Iranian military installations in Syria. After waging a month-long
2018 Southern Syria offensive against the rebels and ISIL, the Syrian government regained control of the eastern Golan Heights on 31 July 2018.
Hostilities are still ongoing. In the first year following the attacks, Hezbollah fired 8,000 rockets into Israel, resulting in the displacement of 70,000 Israelis. During the same period, Israeli reprisals resulted in the displacement of 1.4 million Lebanese people. In June 2024, after a wave of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, Hezbollah launched a series of rocket and drone attacks in the Golan Heights, causing the destruction of of open areas by fire and damaging parts of the
Yehudiya Forest Nature Reserve, including hiking trails and the reserve's Black Canyon. An official from the
Israel Nature and Parks Authority said it would take years for the local flora to recover. A rocket fired from Lebanese territory
struck a soccer field in the Druze town of
Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights on July 27, 2024. The strike resulted in the deaths of 12 Druze children. The IDF stated the rocket was fired by Hezbollah, a claim which Hezbollah denied. US intelligence could not determine if the attack was intentional or a misfire, but they maintained that Hezbollah was responsible. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, along with Iranian and Qatari state media, posited that an Israeli
Iron Dome interceptor was to blame.
2024 Israeli invasion of Syria Following the
2024 Syrian opposition offensives and the
fall of the Assad regime, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered Israeli forces to seize the buffer zone on 8 December 2024, citing the abandonment of Syrian positions and the collapse of the 1974 ceasefire agreement. Israeli forces also launched strikes on Syrian military assets, including air strikes destroying the
Syrian Navy and, it was claimed, 90% of Syria's known surface-to-air missiles. Israel started violating the 1974 Disengagement Agreement before Assad's fall in November with engineering work and battle tanks inside the demilitarized zone. UNDOF had: "repeatedly engaged with the IDF to protest the construction" Hundreds of acres of trees have been cut down by Israel including the Jabaatha Nature Reserve and Kudna forest have been destroyed. In January 2026, several reports documented Israeli planes spraying chemicals on Syrian farmland and forests in the Golan Heights. Israel spraying chemicals were also reported in southern Lebanon. A sample from Lebanon showed that the chemical contained a
carcinogenic classified herbicide, but in dozens of times higher concentration than normal usage. ==Geography==