Israeli war minister says troops will remain in Syrian territory indefinitely
The Israeli minister of military affairs says the regime’s troops, who seized ground at a so-called “buffer zone” inside the strategic Syrian Golan Heights after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, will remain stationed there indefinitely.
“The Israeli military forces will remain at the summit of the Hermon, and the security zone indefinitely to ensure the security of the communities of the Golan Heights and the north, and all the residents” of the Israeli-occupied territories, Israel Katz said on Tuesday during a visit to the Syrian side of Mount Hermon.
Mount Hermon, known as Jabal al-Shaykh in Arabic, is a huge cluster of snowcapped mountain peaks towering above the Syria-Lebanon border.
It overlooks the Damascus countryside as well as the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Katz also said Israel would not allow what he described as hostile forces to establish themselves in southern Syria.
Israeli military forces captured the UN-patrolled buffer zone in the Golan Heights hours after armed groups took control of the Syrian capital of Damascus on December 8.
Israel says it has transferred and installed military equipment within the demilitarized buffer zone in Syria’s occupied Golan Heights.
Israel has been widely and vehemently condemned over termination of the 1974 ceasefire agreement with Syria, and exploiting the chaos in the Arab nation in the wake of Assad’s downfall to make a land grab.
The buffer zone in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights was created by the United Nations after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. A UN force of about 1,100 troops had patrolled the area since then.
Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, said last month that the presence of Israeli soldiers, however long it lasts, violates the deal that established the buffer zone.
That agreement “needs to be respected, and occupation is occupation, whether it lasts a week, a month or a year, it remains occupation,” Dujarric pointed out.
