Israel army officers meet Syria village chiefs: media reports

Israeli media outlets reported that officers from the occupation army recently met with the mukhtars, the heads of villages in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, near where the army has been operating over the past week since the fall of the Assad regime.

Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper quoted a platoon commander in the 77th Battalion of the Armoured Brigade saying: “I asked the mukhtar to collect weapons from the residents of his village, after they took rifles from the sites abandoned by the Syrian army.” So far, the Syrian civilians returned the weapons, he explained.

The newspaper revealed that the occupation army is operating in seven villages in the Syrian Golan Heights, and that occupation forces reached the abandoned Syrian army’s positions around the town of Khan Arnabeh at the end of the week.

The newspaper claimed that the Israeli army will remain in the area until the land is handed over to “an organised and defined state entity so that terrorist organisations do not reach it.”

Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said in an assessment of the situation in the Golan Heights, “We’ve been here for almost a week, the main reason is the security of the country … We have no intention of managing Syria. We are unequivocally intervening in what determines the security of Israeli citizens here, behind us in the communities of the Golan Heights, and we are doing that professionally and correctly, and we are doing it with determination.”

Meanwhile, the Syrian transitional government called on the UN Security Council to take measures to force Israel to immediately stop its attacks on Syrian territory and withdraw from the areas it occupied “in violation of the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement.”

Earlier, the residents of the town of Hader, located in the Qunaitra countryside in southern Syria, expressed their rejection of Israeli calls to join the occupied Golan, stressing their commitment to their Syrian identity.

OPINION: Israel occupies buffer zone in Syria’s Golan Heights (Q & A)