Israel Seizes Land in Syria's Golan Heights

🚨BREAKING: Israel 🇮🇱 is announcing that they are capturing territory from Syria 🇸🇾 in the Golan Heights buffer zone pic.twitter.com/Y7XfjozBBA

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) December 8, 2024

Israel has “seized” territory in Syrian-controlled areas of the Golan Heights, as its military warned Syrians living in five villages close to the Israeli-occupied portion of the strategic area to “stay home”.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he ordered Israeli forces to grab a buffer zone in the Golan Heights established by a 1974 ceasefire agreement with Syria, after a lightning advance by Syrian opposition forces ended Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

Netanyahu said on Sunday that the decades-old agreement had collapsed and that Syrian soldiers had abandoned their positions, necessitating the Israeli takeover.

“We will not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border,” he said.

Israel captured a portion of the Golan Heights in the 1967 war and annexed it. The international community, except for the United States, views it as illegally occupied Syrian territory.

After Netanyahu’s comments, the Israeli military issued an “urgent warning” to Syrians living in Ofaniya, Quneitra, al-Hamidiyah, Samdaniya al-Gharbiyya and al-Qahtaniyah – all close to the Israeli-occupied portion of the Golan Heights.

“The fighting in your area is forcing the IDF [Israeli military] to act and we do not intend to harm you,” Colonel Avichay Adraee, the Israeli army’s Arabic-language spokesman, said on social media.