TEHRAN — Israel’s recent ground operation into southern Syria — reported under the codename “Green-White” and said to have advanced roughly 38 kilometers into Syrian territory, reaching within about 10 km of Damascus — represents the deepest Israeli penetration since the wars of the 1970s and a significant escalation in a campaign that has become systematic since the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
According to Israeli and regional media outlets, Israeli forces have struck military sites across Homs, Latakia, and near Palmyra while also establishing fortified positions, building roads, and erecting bases inside the UN demilitarized buffer zone on the Golan.
Satellite imagery analyzed by Al Jazeera and BBC has documented rapid base construction in the buffer zone since December, feeding fears in Damascus and the region that these are steps toward permanent control of strategic heights and lines of communication.
The escalation has been punctuated by a series of acts of aggression. In late August, Israeli drone strikes in the Damascus countryside killed six Syrian soldiers, a strike that followed a ground incursion reported by Syrian sources.
The next day, Israeli forces carried out a landing operation at a former army site in Kiswa, southwest of Damascus, deploying dozens of troops and search equipment and remaining on site for hours before withdrawing.
On September 8, multiple airstrikes hit sites in Homs, Latakia, and Palmyra. Fresh reports of explosions in Damascus and Latakia have continued alongside claims that newly delivered Turkish equipment was destroyed in these attacks.
These operations are not happening in a vacuum of diplomacy. Damascus and Tel Aviv remain in direct, fraught “security talks” — officials say intended to revive elements of the 1974 disengagement arrangement — even as Israeli officials signal a broader agenda that would codify a sustained security presence in southern Syria.
Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Muhammad al-Jolani), installed after the collapse of the Assad government in December 2024, frames negotiations as an effort to restore pre-2024 borders and curb Israeli strikes.
Israeli statements, by contrast, increasingly describe a perimeter and infrastructure that reads like a long-term occupation.
Supporters of Israel describe the strikes and outposts as a defensive buffer. Many observers — diplomats, regional analysts, and independent verifiers — see something else: a persistent campaign of interdiction that has bled into territorial consolidation.
When interdiction requires roads, hardened positions, and continuous patrols across another state’s internationally recognized territory, the line between “temporary security measures” and de facto annexation begins to blur.
At the same time, Syria has been convulsed by horrific internal violence since al-Assad fell in December 2024.
Monitoring groups and rights investigators have documented widespread extrajudicial killings and massacres — the mass bloodletting in Suwayda is the most visible example — and large-scale, systematic attacks on Alawite communities along the coast and in Homs and Hama, where survivors describe entire families executed, homes torched, and villages targeted in sectarian campaigns.
Amnesty International, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and other monitoring organizations have documented executions in hospitals, public squares, and homes; independent investigations have reconstructed extensive evidence of mass killings.
Additionally, numerous credible reports have documented systematic killings of Alawite civilians along the Syrian coast and in Homs and Hama, where survivors describe entire families executed, homes torched, and villages targeted in sectarian campaigns by militias aligned with the new rulers.
These crimes — committed by a regime rooted in terrorist factions such as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (which was known as al-Qaeda in Syria), Free Syrian Army, and the notorious Jaysh al-Islam — underscore that condemning Israeli aggression should not translate into acquiescing to or glossing over the brutalities of Syria’s new authorities.
Put plainly: Syrian civilians now face a double bind. On one front, deep Israeli penetrations, recurring airstrikes, and the construction of outposts steadily erode Syrian territorial integrity and raise the risk of a wider military escalation. On the other hand, a security vacuum filled by militias and a punitive internal security apparatus has produced sectarian crimes and collective trauma that demand accountability and protection.
That double bind makes the international response both morally and practically urgent. The UN, independent human-rights bodies, and humanitarian organizations must open parallel investigations into cross-border violations and internal atrocities, insist on unfettered humanitarian access, and press for verifiable restraints on the use of force by all parties.
The alternatives are stark: law-based restraint backed by international verification, or permanent partition and balkanization by force. What we have seen so far — a steady push of infrastructure, outposts, and repeated strikes on sovereign territory, coupled with domestic campaigns of sectarian violence — too often looks like the latter.