[News] Israel is abducting ordinary Syrians and seizing their land in Quneitra

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2026/06/israel-is-abducting-ordinary-syrians-and-seizing-their-land-in-quneitra/?ml_recipient=189984192981894503&ml_link=189984032740607358&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2026-06-11&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation+-+8am>
Israel is abducting ordinary Syrians and seizing their land in Quneitra
By Hudda Mattar <https://mondoweiss.net/author/hudda-mattar/>
June 10, 2026
------------------------------
[image: image.png]

An Israeli artillery unit carries out a military drill at the crossroads
between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel on August 28, 2023. (Photo: © Atef
Safadi/EFE via ZUMA Press/APA images)

On May 19, 15-year-old Omar al-Ajraf had walked with his friend, Sanad
al-Mousa, to collect his exam card. Neither returned that afternoon,
disappearing somewhere on the road between their school and their homes in
Rasm al-Ajraf, a hamlet attached to the village of Koudana in Syria’s
Quneitra governorate.

Omar’s mother filed a report with local authorities, posted in local
Facebook groups, and waited through dreadful hours, fearing what might have
gone wrong.

The boys came back the next day with the bruises of a beating still fresh
on them, dumped by Israeli forces on the outskirts of al-Hamidiya, where
the army recently built a military base. A third youth, picked up in the
same operation as he ran across the fields, did not come back at all.

Omar and Sanad are two names on a daily-growing list in Quneitra. After
Bashar al-Assad’s fall in December 2024, Israel declared
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/20/israel-launches-fresh-raids-in-syrias-quneitra-establishes-checkpoints>
the 1974 Disengagement Agreement, brokered after the 1973 war, void and
rolled into the buffer zone, taking Mount Hermon and grabbing control of
the entire strip of land near the border up to the Yarmouk basin in Daraa
governorate.

“They asked me if I belonged to Hezbollah and if I carried any weapons, and
showed me pictures of people I didn’t know,” al-Ajraf told *Mondoweiss*.
“Then they beat us.”

For Omar’s parents, the questions came as a shock. The Lebanese resistance
movement, Hezbollah, has little popular support in Quneitra, and is widely
rejected across Syria, particularly because of its role fighting alongside
the former government.

His family added that the areas where Israeli forces are conducting sweeps
were once strongholds of the armed opposition, which battled the
government, Iran, and Hezbollah throughout the civil war.

“The pattern of arrests, night raids, bulldozer convoys, chemical spraying
of farmland, settler incursions, and cold-blooded killings has unfolded
under a silence from the international system that has functioned, in
practice, as permission,” said Fadel Abdul Ghani, head of the Syrian
Network for Human Rights.

Over the past year, Israel has launched
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/israel-attacked-syria-more-600-092821030.html>
more than 600 air, drone, or artillery attacks across Syria, averaging
nearly two attacks a day, according to a tally by the Armed Conflict
Location and Event Data project.

Syria’s southern regions, including Quneitra, have long witnessed
<https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/05/syria-israels-deliberate-destruction-of-civilian-homes-in-quneitra-war-crime/>
Israeli territorial violations, sowing fear, detaining civilians, erecting
checkpoints and gates, and destroying farmland, but the pace of detention
since December 2024 has no precedent in the area’s modern history.
The detentions no one is counting

Hayam al-Aryan, a schoolteacher in Ghadir al-Bustan in Quneitra, is still
being treated for wounds she sustained when Israeli forces broke down her
door after midnight in February, releasing an attack dog that climbed onto
her bed and bit her face as she slept.

“I woke up terrified, with the dog standing over me,” she said. “It was
biting my face while I was still in bed.”

The same dog also mauled her 19-year-old son, Hamza, a student at a
vocational institute, as he was forced to kneel naked toward the wall. Her
older son, Ali, in his final school year, was taken to another room.

“Hamza was screaming, telling them to take the dog off him,” she said. “I
was screaming, too. The neighbors came out, but no one had any weapons.
They [Israeli forces] took both boys and drove them away.”

Both sons were detained. Their family has had no contact with them since
February.

“The state is silent,” she told *Mondoweiss*. “The media is silent. We are
the only ones still asking where our children are.”

Detentions are extremely commonplace. On May 20, two young men
<https://sana.sy/en/syria/2318038/> from the villages of Bassala and Umm
al-Luqus were detained at Israeli flying checkpoints. On the morning of May
24, university student Muhammad Tareq Mariwid was taken
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA9BnURe5p0> from Jubatha al-Khashab.

According to Ahmad al-Hassan, a local teacher, author, and researcher with
a particular interest in documenting the history and heritage of the Golan
region, there is no official tally of those held. No office accepts
inquiries. No international body, neither the International Committee of
the Red Cross, nor the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, nor the UN Disengagement
Observer Force, has been allowed access.

Syria’s post-Assad government has condemned
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/syria-administration-condemns-israeli-incursions-181549718.html?guccounter=1>
Israel’s actions in and around Quneitra on several occasions, though always
through words rather than force. After an Israeli strike killed three
people in the south, the country’s new leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, said Israel
had pushed into the UN buffer zone under the pretext of confronting Iranian
militias, an excuse he argued no longer held once Damascus was liberated,
and declared Syria ready to welcome international forces into the zone. In
August 2025, the Foreign Ministry condemned
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/25/syria-condemns-new-israeli-military-incursion-in-damascus-countryside>
a fresh incursion in the southwestern Damascus countryside near Quneitra,
accusing Israel of violating the 1974 disengagement agreement to advance
its “expansionist and partition plans” and calling it a grave threat to
regional peace.

The ministry issued similar protests
<https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2025/08/syrian-foreign-ministry-condemns-israeli-incursion-in-damascus-countryside/?so=related>
over the Beit Jinn operation
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/11/israel-is-violating-all-its-ceasefire-agreements-and-escalating-on-all-fronts/>,
while repeatedly affirming Syria’s own commitment to the 1974 accord. Yet
for residents of Quneitra’s frontline villages, who have watched Israeli
forces raze homes, dig fortifications, and seal off roads since December
2024, the statements ring hollow. Many say the government’s condemnations
have changed nothing on the ground, and that words from Damascus are no
substitute for an end to the incursions reshaping their daily lives.

Fadel Abdul Ghani, head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said his
organization has approached the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and
the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria.

“The problem we face is that Israel does not fall within the High
Commissioner’s Syria mandate as an occupying power,” he said. “In practice,
the most effective channel remains coordination with the International
Committee of the Red Cross, as the only body with a traditional mandate to
access detainees. But access to detainees is effectively suspended because
of non-response from the Israeli authorities.”
[image: Quneitera, Syria, where Israeli forces have progressively seized
more land. (Photo courtesy of author)]Quneitera, Syria, where Israeli
forces have progressively seized more land. (Photo courtesy of author)
Detention
is one method. Killing is another.

In April, 17-year-old Osama Ahmad, who requested anonymity for fear of
retaliation, was driving along an agricultural road between Ras al-Zaarura
and the village of al-Rafid, checking on his family’s livestock, when an
artillery shell struck the car and burned him inside it. His father has not
been able to leave the grief of his son’s death.

Bassel al-Khatib, 15, was hit by a sniper’s bullet through the windscreen
of a car as he traveled with his uncle to work near al-Hamidiya. He
survived, but the bullet took his sight. He has undergone a series of
expensive operations to fit a glass eye, with his family selling their
sawmill and moving to find work farther from the Israeli line.

These incidents have not faced any accountability, according to al-Aryan,
the schoolteacher, who, along with the mothers of other detainees,
protested outside the UN office in Damascus on April 19 to no avail.

An Amnesty International report issued in May described
<https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/05/syria-israels-deliberate-destruction-of-civilian-homes-in-quneitra-war-crime/>
the demolition of homes in Quneitra as a grave violation of the Fourth
Geneva Convention and called for an investigation of Israeli actions as war
crimes – but Abdul Ghani said the report stopped short of where it needed
to go.

“The report addressed the violations as standalone acts, without framing
them as consequences of a prior violation, the unlawful entry into the
buffer zone itself,” he said. “Proving the earlier violation reframes every
subsequent act, including the demolitions, as the downstream consequence of
an illegal occupation.”
A poisoned land and stolen water

Earlier this year, Israeli forces sprayed
<https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20260218-israel-spraying-herbicides-syrian-crops>
chemical agents across farmland along the border strip. Soil tests carried
out by Quneitra’s agricultural directorate, headed by Muhammad Rahhal,
identified the substances as toxic pesticides that have collapsed ground
cover, killed pasture, and forced livestock farmers to sell off part of
their herds because fodder costs have become unbearable.

“The soil analysis showed these are toxic pesticides,” Rahhal told
*Mondoweiss*. “They eliminated ground vegetation and killed off the
pasture, which forced herders to sell part of their livestock.”

Roughly 4,000 dunams (988 acres) of orchard land have been damaged,
affecting 255 farmers. Olive tree leaves have dried out, threatening
flowering and fruiting for the entire season. Wheat and barley stalks have
yellowed in the sprayed zones. Women who depend on collecting wild greens
like mallow, dandelion, and wild mint for market income have lost that crop
too, as has the medicinal herb trade in wormwood, thyme, and nettle that
supplies traditional pharmacies.
[image: Ghadir al-Bustan and her 19-year-old son were mauled by an Israeli
army dog The same dog when Israeli forces broke into their home in the
Syrian border town of Quneitra. (Photo courtesy of author)]Women who rely
on income from picking wild herbs were impacted by Israel’s spraying of
chemical agents across Syrian farmland. (Photo courtesy of author)

Muhammad Daoud, head of the beekeepers’ association in Quneitra, said the
spraying has affected his sector due to the disappearance of wild plants on
which bees depend.

“The loss of plant cover and the chemical residue have lowered the quantity
of honey produced,” he explains. “Family incomes have dropped, prices have
risen, and demand has fallen at the same time.”

Water expert Arsan Arsan fears the spraying will reach groundwater as the
toxins leach through the soil.

Bassam al-Shamali, the head of the irrigation authority, has said the water
remains safe, but Arsan’s concern is borne out by Lebanese laboratory and
media reports finding glyphosate, a herbicide classified as probably
carcinogenic by the World Health Organization
<https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-glyphosate/>,
in samples from the same spraying operations that crossed the Blue Line
into Lebanese territory.

“What we are seeing now is the early stage,” Arsan concluded. “The toxic
compounds take time to move through the soil profile and into the aquifer.
By the time the tests confirm it, the damage will already be done.”

Arsan also believes Israel is preparing to siphon Quneitra’s groundwater by
drilling deeper artesian wells into the occupied Golan to supply planned
new settlements, a continuation of a pattern that runs from the draining of
the Hula marshes in the 1950s through the Johnson Plan and the building of
the Quneitra dam.

“Their history of stealing water is long,” he adds. “Ben Gurion said in
1948 that our war with the Arabs is a war over water. The Jewish Agency’s
letter to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference insisted on no concessions
regarding Israel’s rights to the Golan and the Hauran Plain. This is the
same logic working its way through new infrastructure.”

Israeli forces have blocked residents from approaching the al-Mantara dam,
the largest in the area, and the project that was supposed to pump part of
its water to the Damascus countryside has been suspended. Israeli
operations have concentrated in the Yarmouk basin and the Wadi al-Ruqqad
area, which has been shelled multiple times, most recently on May 23.

In Bir Ajam, southeast of Quneitra city, the spring tourist season has
collapsed. Fouad Ibrahim, the head of the municipality, said the village’s
reservoirs at Ruwaihina and Briqa once drew thousands of visitors for their
natural beauty. Now, only the residents who farm or hold government jobs
remain. The pastures have been confiscated. Hundreds of dunams of farmland
are unreachable behind newly raised earthen berms.

“The earthen berm they’re still building has fixed new Israeli positions
and carved off around eight kilometers of village land, to a depth of 150
to 200 meters,” Ibrahim explains. “That’s roughly four thousand dunams
gone.”

A UN observation post sits on the Bir Ajam hill. Israel has erected a
military position beside it with an anti-missile battery that was active
during the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, deepening local fears and emptying the
village of its visitors. Even residents originally from the village who now
live elsewhere have stopped coming home.

The collapse has had a cascading effect on Bir Ajam’s economy, and the
traditional Circassian cheese-making workshops have lost the tourism that
sustained them.

Flying Israeli checkpoints have lengthened the routes dairy producers must
take. Issam Saleh, who oversees a dairy workshop, said he sees up to 100
liters of milk spoiled in a single summer day when refrigeration breaks
down on the long detours.

“This is the situation across most of Quneitra,” he told *Mondoweiss*. “We
are losing the product before it ever reaches the market.”
[image: Quneitera, Syria, where Israeli forces have progressively seized
more land. (Photo courtesy of author)]Quneitera, Syria, where Israeli
forces have progressively seized more land. (Photo courtesy of author) The
settlers behind the bulldozers

Israeli efforts to rewrite the geography of Quneitra to serve its own
purposes go further. Project Sofa 53 <https://www.syriahr.com/en/382530/>,
also called the Great Storm, is a network of wide military roads, earthen
berms, trenches, observation posts, and forward outposts that Israel began
in 2022 and accelerated after December 2024. Israel describes it as its
first line of defense and attack.

According to Bir Ajam’s municipality, one kilometer of construction remains
before the project is complete within Quneitra.

Bulldozer excavations have run from Hadar village in the north to Saida in
the south, converging through Ruwaihina, Qahtaniya, Bir Ajam, Koudana, and
al-Hamidiya. Israeli forces have established mobile checkpoints between the
village of Jabah and the town of Khan Arnabah, searched passersby, and
crossed tanks into al-Hamidiya in central Quneitra as the network expands.
Work continues in Daraa.

Arsan denounced Sofa 53 as a violation of international law and the opening
phase of an implementation of what Israeli strategists call the “David
Corridor.”

“This is the architecture of a new territorial reality,” he said.

Abdul Ghani framed it as the gradual annexation of Syrian land before any
formal declaration, the same pattern that Israel has carried out in the
occupied West Bank.

“They are creating a unilateral buffer zone that reaches between 500 meters
and one kilometer into Syrian territory,” he added. “They are demolishing
homes without military necessity. These are the markers of permanent
presence, not circumstantial intervention.”

The one-sided demining operations Israel has carried out across the strip
of land in Quneitra lack any international legal basis. The 1997 Ottawa
Convention obliges states to clear their own territory of mines, but does
not authorize a second party to conduct clearance operations within another
state’s sovereign territory without that state’s consent. Israel is,
conveniently, not a party to the convention.

Israeli settlers have already arrived. Five attempted settler incursions
into Quneitra have taken place under the watch of both the Israeli army and
Syrian General Security forces. The settlers belong to the Bashan Pioneers,
an extremist movement founded in 2025 for the express purpose of settling
Syrian land. The most recent attempt on May 17 involved settlers tying
themselves to the wall demarcating the buffer zone. The largest, in late
April, brought <https://www.arabnews.jp/en/middle-east/article_168748/> 40
settlers to the region.

The settler group posted a photo
<https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-settlers-raise-flag-over-occupied-syrian-village>
on X showing members standing on a rooftop and said they intended to remain
there until Israeli authorities allowed their families to move in and
establish a civilian presence — a move that, like in the West Bank, is
illegal under international law.

The caption read: “Without civilian settlement, even the military hold
won’t last long term. We’re here until they approve our families to enter
and live here.”

Al-Hassan argues that the movement enjoys security cover from the Israeli
army and shares an interest in altering the geography and demographic
composition of the region by creating conditions to displace the local
population, a reminder of what happened in Palestine in 1948.

“The repeated incursion into Syrian territory is not random,” he said. “It
is bait. It is meant to draw out Israeli expansion in the region and to
pressure the Syrian state in any future security agreement.”

*This story was produced in collaboration with **Egab* <http://www.egab.co/>
*.*
------------------------------

*Hudda Mattar*
Hudda Mattar is a Syrian journalist, children’s program producer, and
documentary filmmaker, with a focus on cultural and political affairs.
------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20260611/9f2f4bad/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 736432 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20260611/9f2f4bad/attachment-0001.png>