The Israeli Occupation Is a Ticking Time Bomb. This Time, in Syria
One night in early 2026, at around 3 A.M., Israeli troops broke into the al-Bashir family's home in Quneitra province in southern Syria. They were looking for Zaid al-Bashir, a poultry farm worker. The soldiers searched the house and broke things, but Zaid was not home. Instead, they arrested his 16-year-old brother, Ali. They told the family that Zaid would have to turn himself in to secure his younger brother's release. Afraid of being detained, Zaid refused. Eight months have passed, and the family still has no information about Ali. The Syrian teenager apparently remains in detention in Israel.
Over the past few months, I have spoken with dozens of people in southern Syria who live in territory Israel has occupied since December 2024. One after another, they described the severe disruption to their lives and their fear of Israeli troops. They spoke of raids on their homes, arbitrary arrests, surprise checkpoints and damage to their livelihoods. Although we have known one another for years, some refused to be quoted or even interviewed. Those who agreed insisted that their names be changed. They're that scared of what Israel might do to them.
I could not help recalling conversations with these same residents less than a decade ago. It was during Syria's civil war. Assad's forces had been driven out of large stretches of territory along the Golan fence, and Israel was providing humanitarian aid to dozens of villages in the area. The wounded and sick were even brought into Israel for often life-saving medical treatment. The effect on local people was unmistakable. They were grateful to Israel and repeatedly described it to me as "a humane country." Many said that Israel continued to receive the wounded, even from towns and villages just dozens of meters from its borders, after Jordan had closed its own borders. A commander in a rebel faction who received military assistance and was treated in Israel told me that "Syrians in the south saw Israel as a friendly country, not an enemy."
All of that is gone now. As residents' fear of Israel grows, so does their hostility. Experts, Israel Defense Forces reservists and residents warn that Israel is creating the very threats it set out to prevent, much as its prolonged occupation of Lebanon helped give rise to Hezbollah.
"We're making enemies there, not friends," says Dr. Nir Boms, a research fellow at the Forum of Regional Cooperation. "We're seeing an increase in activity against us. The problem will come soon, when terror attacks start happening there, and then we'll have the same dynamic as the security zone in southern Lebanon."
"The area right now is a ticking time bomb," adds a Syrian-American researcher who visited the area and requested anonymity. The expert, who specializes in transnational security, says: "What's happening isn't good. We saw it in Iraq and Afghanistan – military interaction with civilians leads to guerilla warfare. A guerilla is brewing in these areas."
Nighttime arrests
The soldiers who raided the al-Bashir home are part of a permanent Israeli military force in southern Syria. The force controls a buffer zone where nine IDF outposts have been established. It conducts patrols, searches and arrests across roughly 600 square kilometers, encompassing dozens of villages and towns in Quneitra governorate and the western part of Daraa governorate.
Israel invaded immediately after the fall of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024. The Israeli military said the invasion was intended to prevent terrorist groups from establishing themselves near the fence along the Golan Heights.
Israel's operations there incorporate practices imported from other places where it occupies a civilian population, as in the West Bank, or controls buffer zones largely emptied of residents, as in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Yet the military's conduct appears not to have been adapted to a densely populated setting where residents are not involved in activity against the troops.
Since the start of the 2024 occupation, Israeli forces have demolished 17 homes in southern Syria, according to a local journalist from Quneitra and another from western Daraa. Some stood near the outposts the military had established, but isolated homes farther away were also destroyed. Alongside the nine outposts, most of them on hills overlooking the surrounding area, the military set up permanent checkpoints near the border. Troops sometimes erect surprise checkpoints as well, detaining people passing through. Residents say soldiers at the checkpoints inspect IDs, photograph people's faces and search their vehicles and cellphones. Several residents said they were asked whether they had participated in the deadly attack by Syrian government forces and their allies on the Druze Mountain region in July 2025.
In addition to arrests at checkpoints, Israeli troops raid residents' homes, search them and make arrests. "They don't knock. They always break down the door," says a journalist from Quneitra. Residents say the searches involve the destruction of property. A man from the Druze village of Hader described a midnight search of his brother's home that terrified the family.
"They tipped over the washing machine, turned the whole house upside down, and of course used their weapons to frighten everyone," he says. "We're not used to this in our village. My nephew, who isn't even 5, started soiling his pants again afterward. The boy has been anxious ever since that night."
Dozens of residents also reported the looting of dollars, jewelry and even food.
Surveillance of local residents appears to be one source of information used to make arrests. One man described the arrest of his twin grandsons, Muhammad and Mahmoud Maryoud, whom he has been raising since their father died in Syria's notorious Saydnaya prison. When he asked the soldiers why they were arresting the 17-year-olds, he says, they replied that "the kids like to talk too much." The teenagers have been detained since September 2025.
Residents of the occupied areas say Israel has recruited local collaborators who write reports, some of them false, about the people around them. A Hader resident says the identities of those collaborating with Israel are well known in the village.
"These are the same people who used to harm us by writing security reports under Bashar and Hafez Assad, accusing us of collaborating with Israel," he says. "Today they're with Israel, accusing us of collaborating with Hezbollah."
He says the informants sometimes fabricate accusations because of "personal problems" with the people they report on. Residents say that in Sunni areas, too, some of Israel's collaborators previously informed for the Assad regime's intelligence agencies.
Interrogations at Sde Teiman
Most detainees are interrogated at Israeli military outposts for several hours or up to a day before being released. According to the Syrian monitoring organization Sijil, Israeli forces detained 248 people in southern Syria between December 8, 2024, and September 1, 2026, most for no more than about a day.
"They asked me what I thought of the Syrian state and of Israel," says one man held at an Israeli outpost in Syria. "They told me they were in Syria to protect us, and they tried to recruit me as an informant." Several detainees reported similar offers.
But while some were released quickly, more than 60 Syrians were transferred to the Sde Teiman and Kishon detention centers in Israel and Ofer Prison in the West Bank. The figure is based on records kept by Sijil and the Syrian government, according to an employee of the organization and a Syrian government official. According to a Syrian lawyer who represents detainees from Quneitra in dealings with international human rights organizations, 39 Syrian detainees remain in Israeli custody, including three minors and one person with a physical disability. The lawyer believes there are other Syrian detainees, from other parts of the country, whose cases he does not know about.
"I learned from released Palestinian prisoners that young men from the Damascus area had been detained and held with them in prison," he says.
"Life in detention was endlessly humiliating," one released prisoner says. "They would enter at 3 A.M. or 8 P.M. and set off stun grenades. They would force us to remain on our knees, our heads on the ground, immobile, while they were aiming guns at us."
I spoke with 10 detainees who had been held in Israel and released back to southern Syria, one released detainee now living in Damascus, and relatives of three detainees, one of whom remains imprisoned in Israel. Most of those released said they had been imprisoned for a year. All had been held at Sde Teiman, and one was transferred from there to the Kishon detention center. Most were questioned a handful of times, but some were questioned only once during their months in custody. They then remained at Sde Teiman for months without further interrogation.
The released detainees said their interrogations sometimes seemed like fishing expeditions to find something to accuse them of, rather than questioning based on intelligence linking them to hostile activity.
"They asked me about ties to Hezbollah, and who in the village worked with Hezbollah," says a Quneitra resident detained for more than a year. "They asked about arms dealers and smugglers. They showed me pictures of my neighbors and asked about my connections to them."
Another former detainee says: "They asked me how I felt about Israel and about the new government in Syria."
The brother of one released detainee says his sibling was initially accused of working for ISIS. In fact, he had fought in a rebel faction that battled ISIS and whose fighters had received medical treatment in Israel until 2018. After that suspicion was disproved, he was falsely accused of taking part in the massacre of Druze in Sweida district in July 2025. After seven months at Sde Teiman, he was released without charge.
"He was arrested in February and initially held in a solitary cell with no roof and no blanket," his brother says. "Rain fell on him, so he couldn't sleep. Then they moved him to a cell with eight or nine other detainees. During the day, they'd take away their blankets. In the morning, they fired stun grenades into the cell. That's how they woke them up. They'd wake them at 3, 4 or 6 in the morning, depending on their luck. They would tell them to stand facing the wall, then take away their beds and leave them on the floor. They'd bring a muzzled dog into the cell. It jumped on the detainees, frightened them and drooled on them."
Before interrogations, the detainee's brother says, "they made him stand alone for six hours in the interrogation room, which had a camera in it. Then the interrogator came in, asked him a few questions, and he was taken back to his cell."
Other detainees held at Sde Teiman described torture by guards as part of the daily prison routine, as well as starvation and prolonged shackling that led to gangrene. A smaller number said they were tortured during interrogations to extract confessions.
Abu Kinan al-Sayed, from Jubata al-Khashab, a small town in northern Quneitra, told Syrian journalist Ahmad al-Masalmeh of France 24 Observers about his detention at Sde Teiman: "Life in detention was an endless stream of humiliation. They forced us to sleep on our stomachs on the concrete floor, sometimes for an hour at a time, in the middle of the night or during the day. They would enter at 3 A.M. or 8 P.M. and set off stun grenades. They would force us to remain on our knees, our heads on the ground, immobile, while they were aiming guns with lasers at us."
Abu Kinan was arrested along with his brother, son and nephew. He was released after 65 days in prison, having been questioned about ties to Hezbollah, without being charged.
Another former detainee told me he was taken to Israel in February 2026 by troops who broke into his home with dogs. He was held at Sde Teiman for 19 days and says he was beaten during interrogation. "They hit me with a round stick. It felt like it was burning me, and it left me in pain for a long time, even though I cooperated with them!"
He says his interrogators showed him photographs of various people. He identified eight of them and told the interrogators about them. He was also asked about the movements of people working for Iran. In 2022, he had indeed spent nine months earning a living in Palmyra as a member of the Zainebiyoun Brigade, an Iran-backed Shi'ite militia composed mainly of Pakistani nationals, before leaving the group.
"I told them everything, everything I'd seen in Palmyra, and gave them a list of people I knew who'd been in the militia with me," he says.
Six months after his release, he is still suffering from post-traumatic stress. Afraid of being arrested again, he left his village and moved to a slum in Damascus.
"There's a nightmare that keeps coming back: I'm running down an alley, dogs are chasing me, and in front of me there's a man hitting me with a stick. I wake up terrified." During the day, too, he says, he constantly feels that someone is following him: "Even here in Damascus. I look behind me and there's nothing there."
"Damascus has no problem with the arrests," a Syrian official says. "As far as it's concerned, Israel is helping get rid of Iran's terrorists or collaborators. Innocent civilians are eventually released, and we gain sympathy internationally and at home."
One released detainee says the violence did not stop once they left Sde Teiman.
"When we were released, they took us from Sde Teiman to Syria," the Quneitra resident says tearfully, describing a journey of about six and a half hours. "They beat us in the vehicle the whole way. They also stepped on my head."
The released detainees say people are held at Sde Teiman during interrogation, while apparently those who are indicted are transferred to Ofer Prison. Neither the released detainees nor their lawyer could say whether any Syrians had been tried or convicted, or whether they had received prison sentences and, if so, for how long.
The detainees' families have no contact with them. Despite a June ruling by Israel's High Court of Justice ordering the resumption of Red Cross visits to security prisons, the International Committee of the Red Cross says it has had no access since October 2023 to detainees held in Israeli facilities, including Syrian civilians.
Anti-Israel activity
Some detainees do have links to activity against Israel. ISIS cells, for example, operate in the area. In August 2026, Syrian security forces arrested Musab Khalil al-Sheikh, known as "the Chinese," on suspicion of leading an ISIS cell in Khan Arnabeh in Quneitra province, according to Syria's Interior Ministry.
A senior local government official in southern Syria told me that "there are many collaborators with Israel, and they use them to keep tabs on people linked to Iran and Hamas."
According to the official, who has access to Syrian intelligence reports, Iran approached a group of Syrians in March 2025 who had previously served in Assad's army and loyalist militias, offering them financial support. The group, now operating under the name Awlu al-Baas, subsequently began issuing statements indicating its affiliation with the Iranian axis. The official says it smuggles weapons to Hezbollah in exchange for Iranian assistance.
But many arrests, he says, are unrelated to that activity: "Some of the detainees are innocent people who simply happen to be there when an arrest takes place and get taken too. And some are Israeli collaborators who are arrested so no one will suspect them."
A resident of Hader, once a Hezbollah stronghold, likewise says arrests in the village are "sometimes on target," with those detained genuinely connected to Hezbollah. "And sometimes we're surprised, because the people whose homes they've broken into are known to be peaceful people."
Strikingly, the senior Syrian official acknowledges that "the Syrian government sees no problem with the arrests. Quite the opposite. As far as it's concerned, Israel is helping get rid of Iran's terrorists or collaborators. The innocent civilians are eventually released, and we benefit from these arrests by gaining sympathy internationally and at home."
Demonstrating presence
Beyond the arrests and raids, the occupation is undermining residents' ability to earn a living. Even without a foreign military presence, Syrians' economic circumstances are dire. A UNDP report published in February 2025 estimated that 90 percent of Syrians lived in poverty in 2024. According to Ninar Press, between 70 and 90 percent of households in Quneitra depend on farming and livestock for their main source of income. Israeli restrictions on access to farmland directly threaten those livelihoods.
Residents say Israel prevents farmers from reaching their land along the border fence and in the Yarmouk Valley. "The Israelis won't let farmers go down to their land," says a farmer from the village of Maaria. "We have no other way to make a living."
Israel has also begun spraying vegetation along the fence with herbicides. The practice, also used along the Gaza border before October 7, is intended to clear the terrain and prevent infiltration toward the Israeli side of the Golan. It has destroyed farmland, grazing land and apiaries in the Syrian Golan.
According to local residents, Israel also blocks access to some of the wooded areas near its outposts, and has even uprooted a few of them. Many Syrians used to cut or gather wood there to heat their homes because they cannot afford diesel, cooking gas or even firewood.
An Israeli reservist who served in southern Syria told me he encountered a practice of firing without a target simply to "make our presence felt... The army is dealing with so many fronts that it doesn't know how to distinguish between them."
As in Gaza and southern Lebanon, residents say Israeli troops fire artillery and mortar rounds, particularly at night. The shelling keeps them from going out to their fields and further restricts their movement. Two Quneitra residents say it has already killed dozens of sheep and goats.
An Israeli reservist who served in southern Syria told me he encountered a practice of firing without a target simply to "make our presence felt."
"The army is dealing with so many fronts that it doesn't know how to distinguish between them," he says. "Things they do on other fronts, like Lebanon, to warn off or keep hostile elements away, they bring to this front too."
Yet alongside the daily practices of occupation, Israel is trying to provide humanitarian aid to people living near the border fence, in both Sunni and Druze villages. The assistance is welcomed by many residents of the Druze villages, where the IDF has established four medical stations.
Accounts from local residents suggest that Sunni villages, by contrast, generally reject the aid. Some refuse on principle to accept assistance from the occupier, while others fear being seen as collaborators. Residents say Druze officers have met with village leaders across the occupied Sunni areas to persuade them to accept aid, including the construction of much-needed infrastructure, but have been turned down.
The aid effort appears to build on Israel's earlier humanitarian work along the Golan fence after Assad's forces were driven out of the area. That assistance began in 2013 and expanded in 2016 under Operation Good Neighbor, which continued until 2018. Through the program, Israel provided humanitarian aid to scores of Sunni villages in Quneitra, the western outskirts of Damascus and Daraa province, and treated thousands of wounded and sick Syrians in Israeli hospitals.
At the same time, according to numerous sources within the factions and among residents, Israel provided military assistance to dozens of rebel groups operating in those provinces, including weapons, salaries and money to buy arms. In 2018, I reported that Israel also provided fire support for unsuccessful rebel offensives against an ISIS affiliate in western Daraa province.
Israel's aim was to create a friendly area across the border and strengthen rebel groups that would prevent hostile forces, particularly Hezbollah, from infiltrating the border region. The program ended in mid-2018, when the Syrian regime, backed by foreign Shi'ite militias, recaptured southern Syria.
The town of Beit Jinn, on the slopes of Mount Hermon, is one example. In 2017, Assad's forces and allied militias besieged the town. Residents survived four months of siege thanks to humanitarian and military aid smuggled in from Israel. As Beit Jinn's defenses neared collapse, Israel went further. According to Syrians who took part in the effort, it allowed hundreds of rebel fighters from Quneitra and Daraa to travel by bus through the Israeli-occupied Golan to Beit Jinn in a failed attempt to keep the town from falling into the regime's hands. Now, however, their view of Israel has changed dramatically.
"After Syria was liberated and the regime fell, we were surprised to see the Israeli army enter the area," says a resident who belonged to a rebel faction supported by Israel at the time. "The army started raiding homes. The first time they came to arrest someone, they broke into a house and killed a young man with an intellectual disability. That was when our view of Israel changed completely. Today the Israeli occupation enters our land, arrests, abducts and kills local people."
On November 28, 2025, Israeli troops entered Beit Jinn to arrest two brothers, one of whom has since been released. They came under fire, and six reservists were wounded. At least 13 residents were killed in the raid, including children, according to Syrian officials and local accounts.
Israeli policy toward the Druze towns on the lower slopes of the Syrian side of Mount Hermon has changed too. Until Assad's fall, these towns were strongholds of Lebanon's Hezbollah, pro-Assad militias and the Syrian army.
Samir Kuntar, the Lebanese Druze terrorist released in 2008 in exchange for the bodies of Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, recruited Syrian Druze into Hezbollah-linked cells. The soldiers had been abducted in the cross-border raid that triggered the Second Lebanon War in 2006. Kuntar was killed near Damascus in December 2015 in a strike widely attributed to Israel.
Throughout the civil war, cells from Hader planted explosive devices targeting Israeli forces in the Golan Heights. Yet Israel not only refrained from attacking the village, it also made its assistance to Sunni rebel factions conditional on their staying away from these Druze communities.
When Assad was ousted, many who had served the regime and Hezbollah feared revenge attacks or arrest. They welcomed the arrival of Israeli troops, who tried to assist Hader's residents. Around mid-2026, however, something changed. According to three residents, the military began confiscating privately owned weapons, searching homes and at times blocking access to farmland. Two months ago, that conduct prompted religious leaders in the town to issue a declaration warning that if it continued, residents would have to defend themselves using force.
"It has become clear that Israel's goal isn't to protect anyone," one resident told me. "Israel has taken over large stretches of farmland and is keeping farmers and shepherds out of extensive areas. They've broken into many homes, frightened families and confiscated weapons we may need to defend ourselves."
Creating the threat
Israel's policy in southern Syria is part of a broader strategy of creating buffer zones born of the trauma of October 7. In Syria's case, however, it seems that occupying the buffer zone actually increases the danger to soldiers. The terrain puts them at a disadvantage compared with the line on the Golan Heights. Instead of occupying fortified positions protected by trenches, surveillance systems and firepower, troops move among a population that becomes more hostile with every arrest and every search.
The continued occupation may itself create the threats it was meant to prevent. Some assessments already indicate that activity against Israel in southern Syria is increasing as the occupation continues.
"From conversations I've had with field commanders, some of them senior officers, who deal with southern Syria, it's clear to them that there's an upward trend, with a correlation between the Israeli presence and anti-Israeli incidents," Boms says.
This tactical gain also prevents Israel from reaching a security agreement with Damascus and building security cooperation against the strategic challenge both countries share: the Iranian axis. Israel's mistakes may allow Iran to expand its influence in southern Syria, as it did in Lebanon.
In fact, officers were describing a sense of futility about the presence in Syria as early as the first month. Reservists who served in the buffer zone told me the same thing.
"We were presented with vague threats," one says. "There was a scenario in which the Syrian army suddenly turned on us. There were reports about hostile elements here or there. There was a sense of general things that might happen, dangerous things that might be coming, but nothing clear or definite."
After an initial period of settling in, he says, "it was clear to everyone that we weren't protecting Israel. We were there to protect ourselves. It was really obvious. Even the most right-wing, hawkish people thought it was strange."
It all came into focus at the end of his reserve service. "One of the officers gave this speech full of pathos, trying to make us feel that what we'd done there had meaning," the reservist says. "But we'd arrested a kid in flip-flops, a kid who raised a pair of binoculars. The main thing was to show we'd done something there. Who are you kidding? What bullshit."
Responses
The Israel Prison Service said in response: "The Israel Prison Service does not comment on the details or location of security prisoners' detention. All prisoners in Israel Prison Service custody are held in accordance with the law, with their rights upheld and in accordance with the decisions of the relevant authorities."
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit said in response:
"The IDF acts in accordance with directives from the political echelon and operates in southern Syria based on assessments of the situation and security needs. The presence of IDF forces in the area is intended to protect residents of the Golan Heights, maintain border security and prevent hostile elements from establishing a foothold in or entering the area.
"As part of its efforts to maintain security, the IDF has conducted various operations over the past year, including arresting individuals suspected of involvement in terrorist activity against Israeli civilians or IDF forces. These suspects were taken to a designated facility in Israel for further questioning, screening and detention. Their detention at this facility is governed by Israeli law and the IDF orders issued pursuant to it, and all measures comply with international law. Throughout the war, detainees found not to be involved in terrorist activity have also been released back to Syria, with measures taken to ensure their safety.
"The IDF takes care to uphold the rights of detainees held at the detention facility under its responsibility. Detainees receive regular meals, including three meals a day, as well as access to water and medical care as needed. Detainees are handled under security supervision, in accordance with strict procedures, by appropriately trained personnel serving in the regular military and the reserves.
"Those held in IDF detention facilities include trained terrorist operatives considered highly dangerous. Prolonged restraint during detention is used in exceptional cases and only for as long as significant security and safety considerations apply, with the detainee's health also taken into account.
"The IDF has various oversight mechanisms to ensure that detention facilities operate in accordance with IDF orders and the law. These include continuous monitoring through closed-circuit cameras, periodic discussions at the General Staff level, supervision by commanders at the facility and other measures. In addition, detention facilities are subject to oversight by an external official inspector, as prescribed by law. The use of dogs to harm detainees is prohibited."
-- Elizabeth Tsurkov is a doctoral candidate in political science at Princeton University and a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking. She has been researching Syria for 18 years.