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Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa has said negotiations between his country and Israel on a new security agreement could yield results “in the coming days”.

His comments come days ahead of his visit to New York where he will address the UN General Assembly for the first time since taking power.

Spurred by Washington, Syria and Israel have engaged in tense talks for months in a bid to reach a pact that Damascus hopes will end Israeli air strikes, incursions and land grabs in the country’s south.

In a briefing on Wednesday evening with journalists, Sharaa said reaching an agreement was a “necessity” for Syria but noted that any such deal would not be considered a peace treaty. The two countries have been at war since the state of Israel’s creation, which Syria has never recognised.

Instead, Sharaa said Syria was seeking an agreement that would mark a return to a 1974 armistice that created a UN-monitored demilitarised buffer zone along their shared border, or “something like it”.

A regional official familiar with the efforts confirmed they aimed to finalise the agreement ahead of next week’s UN meetings, at which the hope was to “create some kind of meeting” between Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sharaa.

Since Sharaa’s Islamist rebels toppled the Assad regime last December and swept to power, Israel has expressed open hostility and has abandoned that agreement, sending its troops deeper inside Syrian territory and seizing several strategic positions. 

Sharaa said Israel had carried out more than 1,000 air strikes across Syria since December, and conducted more than 400 ground incursions, with the country’s officials saying Israel’s military would remain on Syrian territory indefinitely.

Human Rights Watch this week said Israeli forces occupying parts of southern Syria had carried out abuses against residents, including the war crime of forced displacement.

Israel wanted to maintain its troops’ presence in those positions, Sharaa said, including the strategic hilltop of Mount Hermon — which sits on the border between Syria, Lebanon and a UN demilitarised buffer zone in the Golan Heights. 

Amid reports that Israel was seeking a completely demilitarised southern Syria and a no-fly zone, Sharaa insisted any pact would need to respect Syria’s aerial space and territorial unity, but acknowledged that talks were ongoing about what a Syrian troop presence in the south could look like.

If the agreement were to succeed, then others like it could follow, but this would be “neither peace nor normalisation”, he said, referring to the US-mediated Abraham Accords, which led to several countries in the region normalising diplomatic ties with Israel. Sharaa said reaching an agreement was one thing, but getting Israel to abide by it would be another. 

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Asked whether the Israel-occupied Golan Heights were currently being discussed, Sharaa said it was too early as the issue was “a big deal”.

In recent weeks, diplomats and Syrian officials told the Financial Times that Washington was pressuring Damascus to reach a deal with Israel, despite the latter’s maximalist demands, which Sharaa denied, saying the US was instead playing a mediating role.

Sharaa said the two countries had been just “four to five days” away from reaching an agreement in July, but that the eruption of fighting in the southern province of Sweida — which triggered Israel strikes on the defence ministry and close to the presidential palace — had derailed those efforts. 

Sharaa on Wednesday described those strikes as “not a message but a declaration of war”, and said Syria held back from responding militarily in order to preserve the delicate negotiations.

Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv