Israel will not leave Syria alone! Israeli raids, Wednesday evening, struck the Scientific Research Institute in the Barzeh neighborhood in Damascus according to Sana, the Syrian news agency.
Israeli warplanes went on to strike the Hama military base with more than 11 air raids, Sana pointed out. later reports show that the military airport was targeted 17 times.
The Israeli Channel 12 added that an additional target was the T4 military airport in rural Homs.
The Israeli raids, almost daily, started months ago on Syria and its capital, Damascus, and increased after 9 December 2024 when there was a change of regime in the country.
Residents in Damascus said they heard loud explosions after the intense air raids that targeted the scientific building in Barzeh.
But before that Israel has been conducting deadly air raids, literally mounting to thousands on Syria for years under the now ousted Baath regime of President Bashar Al Assad.
Israel then claimed it was targeting Hezbollah and Iranian bases but there were many deaths and injuries.
Israel occupied most of the Syrian Golan Heights after the 1967 Arab-Israel war, and took advantage of the fall of the regime and occupying the country’s buffer zone and declaring the collapse of the 1974 disengagement agreement between the two sides.
The current talks between US officials and Hamas leaders in Qatar is certainly a deep wound for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who had long promised that he would finish off the Islamic organization in Gaza for good.
Indeed, it’s a double-wound for Netanyahu and his extremist government who had been under an illusion, perhaps a strong word to use, that US President Donald Trump would long share the Israeli extremist objectives of taking over Gaza, getting rid of its people en masse, and end Hamas rule in the 364-kilometer enclave.
‘We’re the United States. We’re NOT an agent of Israel’ — Trump’s hostage envoy Boehler
Trump, especially over the past few weeks, had certainly given the Israelis that impression, especially when he blurted out at a devastating press conference with Netanyahu in the White House in early February 2025, that what he wants is to create a Middle East Riviera in Gaza that would include ‘voluntarily’ displacement of the 2.2 million Palestinians living there and swiftly end Hamas-rule. The president added what he wants to do is for the United States to take over Gaza and make it a top property front-beach development.
The whys, ifs, and hows didn’t matter whilst the details were left to be ironed out for later, while the focus zoomed on what Trump was saying which literally seemed to be straight off the top of his head as unrehearsed “blabber” non – certainly not members of the new administration – knew about as the new man in the White House dictated his shallow views and hearsay.
To Netanyahu it was music to his ears and he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He just stood, smiled, glared and looked into the cameras pleased with his friend. To say the least however, he was gob-smacked and taken off-guard.
Trump’s bombshell announcement created an almost mass hysteria among the Palestinians, Arab world and internationally with people aghast, not knowing what to say, what to do and how to respond. Trump had then just announced the trampling on decades of international law – behest through the United Nations resolutions condemning Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza and its heinous and vile military rule.
Enters Hamas in US thinking
However, Netanyahu’s smirk was soon wiped off when it became clear that Trump was offering him Dutch-courage support while directly talking to Hamas officials at the same time. The Israelis become livid, especially when they got to know about the on-going meetings through third parties and leaked sources.
Today, Netanyahu is in a state of a quandary. For the first time he is finding that the political strings and threads are no longer in his court anymore as was the case with the former administration and despite the fact Trump just unfroze the MK-84 2000-pound bombs to Israel which Joe Biden slammed on Israel in May 2024 and adding that the security of Israel remains his top priority.
But today Netanyahu has become deeply-troubled with what is being regarded as double-talk and double-dealing! The bombs supply were to be a palliative to what is being “cooked” behind closed doors.
In Trump, and through his team led by Steve Witkoff and Adam Boehler, Netanyahu is finding out that the new republican president in the White House is not an easy man and despite the strong Israeli lobby in Washington he doesn’t necessarily mean what he says and he is always looking out for America as the No. 1 interest. It is high politics trickery designed to get things done.
For the first time in this 16-month war on Gaza which Israeli started after 7 October, 2023, Netanyahu is finding himself in a corner, no longer able to pay just lip-service to the multitude of talks held in Doha and Cairo over the months of 2024 and which led to nowhere but increased the destruction of Gaza and the killing of its people.
Although Trump maybe a very good friend to Israel – a claim registered in his earlier administration when he moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, a first-ever move by a US president and openly-backed the continued occupation of the Golan Heights, the businessman-politician is not interested in wars and has moved immediately to stop the three-year-old Ukraine war with Russia and now is dilly-dallying with Gaza.
The current talks in Doha are aimed to extend the ceasefire to be executed in three stages reached on 19 January, just one day before Trump officially entered the White House. While stage I has just ended, the Netanyahu government is foot-dragging, not wanting to move onto the second and third stage mainly because of ideological, domestic political reasons and his eminent threat of going to prison on corruption charges.
Netanyahu fears continuing the ceasefire deal would mean the end of his government that is controlled by extremists who want the war on Gaza to continue and have stated time and again that they would bring the government down if Netanyahu makes a deal that is less than re-occupying Gaza and stamping out Hamas which continues to be a fanciful dream.
Present talks
But the present US talks in Gaza with the Islamist organization that ruled the enclave since 2007, and under a tight Israeli siege that continues today, is creating a flurry of muted tense relations between Tel Aviv and Washington occasionally coming out in-the-open as was the case through a leaked phone call between Boehler, a new man in charge of the hostages file in the US administration and Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, a close Netanyahu ally.
His protest was made recently by refusing to go with his Israeli team to join the latest bout of negotiations in Doha to kick-start the second stage of the ceasefire and release more hostages at their current number of 60 including one US-Israeli soldier and four American bodies that have been killed by Israeli bombardment and kept during Israel’s war on the enclave in the last months.
At the present time four meetings were held between American and Hamas officials with the last headed by chief of the movement Khalil al-Hayya. To say the least, Israel is irritated, angry, and dumbfounded and what is happening. Netanyahu is simply flabbergasted at Trump which he always regarded as a deep personal friend of him and Israel. He and Dermer had impressed on the US administration not to take Hamas directly but it is clear the latter has not and is not heeding to the suggestion and going their own separate way.
Through different media sources and to the annoyance of the Israelis Boehler has stressed that talks so far has been “very helpful” and indicated that a resolution of the freeing of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza would be finalized in the next few weeks.
The world is watching to see how this intricate situation will unfold. The Trump administration is trying to play down their meetings with the Hamas leaders, but this is not working, especially as Boehler keeps talking to the media about how constructive the talks are going and the fact that these Hamas leaders are “pretty nice guys,” and these “guys are just like us,” as he recently told CNN.
The next few weeks will show more. When he came to office, Trump said that if Hamas doesn’t surrender, he would turn Gaza into hell. Judging from what is happening on the ground today such a comment is merely rhetorical.
The above-analysis is written by Dr Marwan Asmar, chief editor of the crossfirearabia.com website.
Hundreds of Syrians demonstrated in the southern Daraa province on Tuesday against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for the demilitarization of southern Syria.
Protesters gathered in the March 18 Square in Daraa city, calling Netanyahu’s comments a “blatant interference” in Syria’s internal affairs, according to an Anadolu correspondent.
Israeli drones were seen flying over the area during the protest.
On Sunday, Netanyahu called for the complete demilitarization of southern Syria in the provinces of Quneitra, Daraa and Suweyda from the forces of the new Syrian army.
“We will not tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria,” he claimed, saying that the Israeli army will stay in Syria’s buffer zone and the Syrian Hermon Mount “Jabal al-Sheikh” for “an unlimited period of time.”
After the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December, Israel expanded its occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights by seizing the demilitarized buffer zone, a move that violated the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria.
Israel’s recent military advances in the Golan Heights, which it has occupied since 1967, have drawn condemnation from the United Nations and several Arab nations.
Syria has just turned a gloomy chapter of its long turbulent history that lasted for at least half-a-century. The question now is: Will this new era bring better or worse news for this beleaguered country and its people?
The new local stake holders on the ground and outside players are showing different and often conflicting signals of what lies ahead. A month ago, the totalitarian Assad dynasty regime collapsed, its dictator fled the country, his strong men melted into the caves, his father’s imposing statues downed and his foreign supporters’ influence, Iran and Russia, evaporated. From this underdog dark side, the game was over!
But it was not so on the other rising side of the game, where you have the local opposition of multiple groups and their new de facto foreign partners and friends, celebrating the defeat of the bygone oppressive regime.
All they see is a helpless, desperate and a lone prey for the cut! In real terms the country, so far, is being divided into different de facto regional enclaves or mini-states. Each is controlled by its own local leaders. Members of each community share either the same faith, or speak the same language, or adhere to a host of old norms and traditions inherited from their ancestors.
Both leaders and their followers of each faction are finding themselves at a crucial turning point. Do they want to repeat what their previous leaders did when they, willy-nilly, allowed the central government under the Assad regime, run their daily life affaires, and then when it was too late, discovered that they were either deceived or coerced by the now defunct regime’s agents? Or are they saying no more of this stuff this time, and accordingly acting more independently to preserve their special identity and immune their rights?
The idea of partitioning Syria as we know it since its independence in 1946 is not new! It can be traced back to its pre-independence original format, conceived then by the French mandatory power in the early 1900s, when the Ottoman’s four centuries rule, of the whole of Arabia and North Africa, came to an end.
At that time, France, sanctioned by League of Nations, suggested to divide the country into five main enclaves or mini-states: An Alawite enclave on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean with Latakia as its capital, an Aleppo enclave in the north, a Jabal Druze enclave in the south, bordering Jordan, Alexandretta enclave which was taken by Turkey and renamed as the Hatay province, and finally the dominated Sunni region in the center with its capital Damascus.
Today, the US, with the consent of other good wishers, are openly pushing, by deeds and words, to create an additional enclave in the autonomous Kurdish oil-rich region in the north-eastern part of Syria. On the Golan Heights, the new strong players are turning a blind eye to the serious Israeli military encroachments inside proper Syrian territories, previously recognized by the world community and UN resolutions. At the same time, the emerging clashes in the east and west of the country and other places in the center, between rivaling armed groups, leave little room for optimism.
The most important step Syrians need today is a constitution that can stand at the same distance from all components of the society. But surprisingly, the last statement attributed to the new top man in Damascus saying such a constitution might take four to five years to come to life, can only send discouraging and negative signals to all the components of Syrian society and others!
A final question that must be asked: Is Syria nearing to lose its last chance to avoid falling back in the pre-independence fragmentation trap?
This opinion was especially written for Crossfire Arabia by Saleem Ayoub Quna who is a Jordanian author writing on local, regional and international affairs and has two books published. He has a BA in English Literature from Jordan University, a diploma from Paris and an MA from Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He also has working knowledge of French and German.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in court in Tel Aviv for the 4th time, Wednesday, to testify in his corruption trial.
Netanyahu’s hearing session was scheduled for Tuesday but was canceled after he embarked on a secret visit to Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh) in Syria’s demilitarized zone in the occupied Golan Heights.
According to the Israeli public broadcaster KAN, Netanyahu’s session on Wednesday is expected to focus on a case known as “4000” in which the prime minister is accused of providing regulatory favors to Shaul Elovitch, then-owner of Bezeq Telecom Company and the Walla news site, in exchange for favorable coverage for him and his wife.
Netanyahu, the first sitting Israeli leader to take the stand as a criminal defendant in the country’s history, faces accusations of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, which he denies according to Anadolu.
Netanyahu also faces charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, with the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for him and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in November over atrocities in Gaza.
CrossFireArabia
Saleem Ayoub Quna
