Syria on Monday said it “strongly condemns” what it said was an Israeli military incursion into an area in the country’s south, calling it a “dangerous escalation.”
According to Syria’s Foreign Ministry, dozens of soldiers and over 10 military vehicles were involved in a raid in the area of Beit Jinn, which sits near the border with the Golan Heights.
It also condemned Israel’s “control” of an area in the Mount Hermon foothills, saying it is a “blatant violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic.”
The IDF has been deployed to nine posts inside southern Syria since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December 2024, mostly within a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the border between the countries.
Troops have been operating in areas up to around 15 kilometers (some nine miles) deep into Syria, including Beit Jinn, aiming to capture weapons that Israel says could pose a threat to the country if they fall into the hands of “hostile forces,” as Iranian-backed groups did during Assad’s rule.
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It distrusts Syria’s new government, which is led by former jihadists.
Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, receives Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister in Damascus, Syria, on May 31, 2025. (SANA / AFP)
There was no information from the Israeli military on any specific military raids on Monday.
The statement came hours after Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa confirmed to Arab journalists that his government was in “advanced” talks with Israel on a security agreement, seeking to clinch an Israeli retreat back to the 1974 disengagement lines that previously formed the de facto border between the countries, according to Sky News Arabic.
Israel and Syria have technically been at war since 1948. Israel conquered around two-thirds of the Golan Heights from Syria during the Six Day War of June 1967, and annexed the territory in 1981, in a move not recognized by much of the international community, with the exception of the United States.
A year after the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, Israel and Syria reached an agreement on the disengagement line that Damascus is now pushing to restore.
Tensions soared between Jerusalem and Damascus when Israel took over the UN-patrolled buffer zone in Syria shortly after the Assad regime’s overthrow in December and carried out airstrikes on military sites, in what officials said was aimed at creating a demilitarized zone south of Damascus.
In July, the IDF conducted airstrikes on Syrian government forces to support Syrian Druze — who have close relations with Israel’s Druze community — during violent clashes with regime-allied forces in the Sweida area of southern Syria.
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