Late on Saturday, Israeli forces launched a fresh ground incursion into Syria’s southern Quneitra province, marking yet another violation of Syrian sovereignty and international law. According to the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), an armoured Israeli column comprising at least two Merkava tanks, two military vehicles and a Humvee entered the strategic eastern hill of Tal al‑Ahmar al‑Sharqi, where troops immediately took up positions inside prefabricated structures that had been delivered just a day earlier. The advance was not a fleeting patrol but a deliberate, pre‑planned occupation. On Friday, Israeli forces had already transported three truckloads of prefabricated rooms to the same hilltop, accompanied by a crane, a bulldozer and two additional Humvees, and had begun unloading the structures under military cover. By Saturday evening, those temporary rooms had been converted into a fixed military post, complete with a bulldozer still present on the hill, effectively establishing a new Israeli outpost inside Syrian territory. No official explanation has been provided for the move, but the intent is there for those that look at it closely: Israel is systematically colonising land beyond the occupied Golan Heights.
This creeping annexation did not occur in a vacuum. It is the direct consequence of Israel’s unilateral declaration, made immediately after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, that the 1974 Disengagement Agreement had “collapsed”. That accord, brokered by the United Nations, had for five decades maintained a demilitarised buffer zone between Israeli‑held territory and Syrian forces. With the Syrian army’s withdrawal from its positions, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his troops to seize the buffer zone and beyond, a move that the international community has largely failed to condemn. Since then, Israeli forces have not only occupied the zone but have also constructed at least ten permanent military bases across Quneitra and Daraa provinces, razing farmland, demolishing homes and uprooting hundreds of Syrian civilians in the process. Saturday’s incursion into Tal al‑Ahmar, which lies outside the original buffer zone, represents a further expansion of that occupation, a clear breach of the 1974 accord.
The Quneitra incursion is far from an isolated incident. Since the collapse of the Assad government, Israeli forces have carried out repeated ground infiltrations, set up checkpoints, conducted arrests and disappearances of Syrian residents, and used heavy machinery to bulldoze agricultural land. Simultaneously, the Israeli air force has launched wave after wave of airstrikes across Syria, targeting former military sites but repeatedly killing civilians. In mid‑April alone, Israeli shelling near the city of Nawa in Daraa province killed nine civilians, while separate strikes on Latakia and Tartus provinces killed at least one more and wounded three others. A British‑based war monitor reported that, in a single round of violence in early April, 745 civilians were killed in the coastal provinces, alongside dozens of fighters. None of these operations have been authorised by the United Nations Security Council, and all violate the most basic principles of the UN Charter.
What makes this latest violation particularly cynical is its timing. Just days before the incursion, Syrian President Ahmad al‑Sharaa had publicly declared that Damascus is “serious about reaching some form of security agreement” with Israel that would preserve regional stability. In an interview with Anadolu, al‑Sharaa confirmed that talks had not reached a dead end, though they were moving with “extreme difficulty” precisely because of Israel’s insistence on maintaining a military presence inside Syria. The Syrian leader made clear that any agreement must guarantee Israel’s full withdrawal to the 1974 disengagement lines, and that the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 remains Syrian land, any other status being invalid. Rather than reciprocating this overture, Israel has responded by sending tanks and prefabricated barracks deeper into Syrian soil.
As the US‑Iran ceasefire holds and Washington’s attention remains fixed on the Persian Gulf, Israel is exploiting the vacuum to entrench its occupation of southern Syria. The prefabricated rooms now standing on Tal al‑Ahmar hill are not merely temporary shelters for soldiers; they are permanent symbols of a state that believes itself above international law. The 1974 Disengagement Agreement may be old, but it remains binding until formally terminated by mutual consent, something Israel has never sought. The Security Council, meanwhile, has shown no appetite to act. With each new incursion, each new settlement, each new civilian killed, Israel expands its illegal occupation, while the international community offers nothing more than routine statements of “concern”. For the people of Quneitra, whose homes lie within sight of the advancing tanks, concern is not enough. Action is required, but it is not coming.