Israel Expands Invasion of Syria, Launching Massive Airstrikes After Assad's Fall

Israel’s message is clear: regardless of who governs Syria, Israel will ensure it does not possess the basic military capacity to defend itself.

Israeli airstrikes in Damascus early on December 10, 2024. Photo by Omar HAJ KADOUR / AFP via Getty Images.

As armed opposition militias marched into Damascus and overthrew the government of Bashar al-Assad, Israel wasted no time in unleashing a massive campaign of airstrikes across Syria. While statues of Assad and his father, Hafez, were being pulled down from city squares across the country and thousands of political prisoners were being freed, Israeli tanks crossed through the occupied Golan Heights and invaded deeper into Syrian territory, occupying a “buffer zone” created in 1974. By Tuesday, Israeli forces had penetrated farther into the country, occupying a swath of territory twice the size of the Gaza Strip.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the bombing and invasion as self-defense, many of the military sites destroyed by Israel were defensive weapons systems and conventional military facilities. Netanyahu declared that the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel for nearly 60 years, will remain part of Israel “for eternity,” citing its strategic importance for Israeli security. On Monday, Netanyahu heralded what he called “a new and dramatic chapter” in the history of the Middle East. “The collapse of the Syrian regime is a direct result,” he said, “of the severe blows with which we have struck Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.”

As Netanyahu spoke, the Israeli military was expanding its sweeping campaign to degrade or eliminate Syrian military deterrence capabilities standard among nation states. Israel’s message is clear: regardless of who governs Syria, Israel will ensure it does not possess the basic military capacity to defend itself.

“It's showing Syrian people straight away, ‘Our problem is with you. It's with your sovereignty, it's with your existence, it's with your security. What we're doing now is making sure that you are totally defenseless. We're exploiting this moment of chaos to completely disarm you and make sure that you're completely defenseless in the future so that we can do whatever we like,’” said Robin Yassin-Kassab, a British-Syrian analyst and co-author of the book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. “There's never been such crazy Israeli bombing in Syria. They're arranging to disarm Syria completely, to make it completely defenseless and to humiliate it. That's the way that Syrians are understanding it as well. They are humiliating Syria.”

The U.N. special envoy for Syria Geir Pederse called Israel’s military operations in Syria “very troubling” in a briefing in Geneva. “We are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments into Syrian territory,” he said. “This needs to stop."

The Biden administration has not called on Israel to halt its military operations nor condemned its occupation of more Syrian territory. “The Syrian army abandoned its positions in the area around the negotiated Israeli-Syrian buffer zone, which potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a briefing on Monday. “Israel has said that these actions are temporary to defend its borders. These are not permanent actions.” British foreign secretary David Lammy likewise defended Israel’s attacks in Syria, saying “there are legitimate security concerns for Israel, particularly in the context of a country that has housed ISIS, Daesh, and Al-Qaeda.”

Since Assad’s removal, Israel has launched over 300 airstrikes across the country, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, hitting Syrian military installations, airports, weapons depots, radar and air defense systems, and aircraft squadrons in Damascus, Homs, Hama, Latakia, and elsewhere, in what an Israeli security source called “one of the largest attack operations in the history of its air force,” in comments to Israeli Army radio. The Israeli navy also carried out a large-scale operation on Monday night to destroy the Syrian navy fleet.

“It's with American and British and German weapons that they're bombing the hell out of Syria,” Yassin-Kassab told Drop Site. “Is that really the message that the Western world wants to give the Syrians? This is a moment where every right thinking person in the world should be giving them solidarity, asking them what they need, how can they help?” he said. “What's happening is that the most powerful states in the world are supporting the terror bombing of Syria.”

Israeli tanks and troops have expanded the Israeli occupation, taking over former Syrian army positions on the highest point of Jabal al-Sheikh, which Israel calls Mount Hermon, and spread across a buffer zone in place since a 1974 armistice agreement that officially ended the war between Syria and Israel. In the town of Quneitra in the Golan Heights, reports emerged of Israeli troops invading the town and turning its justice department building into a military base. Video and photographs posted by Israeli soldiers show them posing inside local Syrian government offices and spraying abandoned homes with bullets, as well as Israeli tanks positioned in the streets. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Monday said the military would seize the entire buffer zone to protect Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, which Israel has illegally occupied since 1967. The area is home to Israel's only ski resort and some Israelis have already begun celebrating its potential expansion deeper into Syria. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey have all condemned Israel’s advance, while UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric on Monday said the Israeli incursion constitutes a violation of the 1974 Disengagement Agreement.

An image of an Israeli soldier in Qunietra, southern Syria, as posted by Younis Tirawi on X.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friend, President-elect Donald Trump for acceding to my request to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights, in 2019,” Netanyahu said. “The importance of this historic recognition has been underscored today. The Golan Heights will be an inseparable part of the State of Israel forever.”

Yassin-Kassab said that the U.S. and other nations’ diehard support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has empowered Netanyahu to attack and invade Syria. “It would be much more sensible for Israel to try to come to terms with the fact that they need to make amends to the people whose country they've stolen and that they need to get on good respectful relations with the neighbors,” he said. “But there's no sign of that at all. The message that they're sending to the Syrians is: ‘We have no respect for you, we have no respect for you whatsoever.’”

Assad and Israel

Throughout the past year, Israel has repeatedly bombed Syria in strikes that were overwhelmingly aimed at Iranian and Hezbollah personnel, sites, and weapons shipments. Assad, however, never once ordered retaliatory strikes against Israel; the Syrian government generally accepted the periodic bombing by Tel Aviv as the cost of keeping Iran as one of its most powerful allies. And Syrian territory remained a key pipeline for Iranian support to Hezbollah. Israel “used to bomb Iranian and Iranian militia and Hezbollah targets, any weaponry which could potentially be transferred to Lebanon and then potentially used against [Israel]. That's what they used to bomb. But they largely left the Syrian [government] stuff alone,” said Yassin-Kassab. “They left it alone because they knew very well that that's not for use against us, that's for use against the Syrian people. And that's fine. Now they're bombing everything they can all over the country.”

Under Assad, Syria was officially a part of the Axis of Resistance, the loose coalition of both nation-states and non-state actors in the Middle East who pledged to jointly oppose Israel. But unlike the other members—Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis in Yemen and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—Syria did not launch attacks against Israel in solidarity with the armed resistance in Gaza despite bordering the Israeli-occupied Golan. “It's been by far the most peaceful border that Israel has had. It's been much more peaceful than borders with states with whom they've had peace agreements,” said Yassin-Kassab. “There's been more trouble on the border with Egypt and on the border with Jordan than there has been on the border with the occupied Golan Heights even though the Syrian regime pretended to still be in a state of war with Israel.”

Prior to the uprising in 2011, when Syrians took to the streets to demand major reforms, and the subsequent brutal response from Assad, the longtime Syrian leader was engaged in secret negotiations brokered by the U.S. to make a deal with Israel.

“Assad had acknowledged that peace with Israel would require him to break military ties with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and he said he was ready to do so once he had Israel's commitment to return to Syria all territory seized by Israel during the June 1967 War,” said Ambassador Frederic Hof, who served as the special coordinator for regional affairs in the US Department of State’s Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace where he conducted the backchannel peace mediation between Israel and Syria. “A one-on-one meeting between Assad and me on February 28, 2011 and a subsequent meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and his team a few evenings later convinced me, at the time, that there was a clear pathway to an Israel-Syria peace treaty.”

Hof told Drop Site that Assad had assured him that “Lebanon would follow Syria into peace with Israel, with Hezbollah becoming what he described as a normal Lebanese political party. But I still had profound doubts that Iran and Hezbollah could be handled so easily. The things Assad said he wanted in exchange for this massive strategic reorientation were the complete, phased return of Syrian territory and the gradual lifting of American sanctions. He knew the Israeli withdrawal would take three to five years. And I told him American sanctions would be lifted in conjunction with Syria implementing its treaty-related commitments.” Hoff, who is now a Senior Fellow at Bard College's Center for Civic Engagement, said Assad’s violent response to the protests in 2011 killed the deal.

As Syria descended into civil war, Assad’s relationship with Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia deepened to a point where his very survival depended on them. Russian forces carried out some of the most deadly attacks of the more than decade-long war; they led to the recapture of territory seized by opposition militias and exacted a horrifying toll on Syrian civilians. Both Hezbollah and Iran deployed forces inside Syria to aid the Assad government and Hezbollah’s militias played a decisive role in fighting armed opponents of the Syrian government, allowing Damascus to reclaim and hold lost territory. Over the past 14 months, as Israel expanded its wars in Gaza and Lebanon, conducted attacks on Iran, and repeatedly struck Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria, Assad’s grip on power became more fragile. Russia’s focus on the war in Ukraine meant the unleashing of Moscow’s massive airpower to defend the Syrian government was in question.

More than a decade of civil war fueled by multiple nations, combined with crippling U.S.-led international sanctions, resulted in the loss of government control of large swaths of Syrian territory to various groups backed by foreign powers, including the U.S., Turkey, and several Gulf states. While Syria has historically portrayed itself as a defender of the fight for Palestinian liberation and resistance against Israel, Assad’s alliances were strategically rooted in preserving his rule and to prevent the state of Syria from breaking apart.

“Syria has not confronted Israel for 42 years, Syria is not an active agent of resistance. Syria is a passive agent that enables other parties’ resistance, specifically, Hezbollah. So it's a resistance enabler, it serves as the lifeline, or a bridge, between Iran and Hezbollah,” said Bassam Haddad, founding director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “Before November 27 the role of Syria and the Axis of Resistance could only be confirmed counterfactually. Now we have the counterfactual, and it's a matter of time before we recognize the weight of this role.”

In the aftermath of the recent Israeli attacks that wiped out much of the upper echelon of Hezbollah’s leadership, including its secretary general Hasan Nasrallah, and the eventual signing of a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon in late November, Israel issued a series of warnings to Assad: If Syria continued to support Hezbollah in Lebanon by allowing weapons and personnel to pass through Syria, “Not only the convoys will be attacked, but there will be prices to pay in Syria as well.” Netanyahu bluntly warned, “Assad must understand that he is playing with fire.”

“On the one hand, you cannot underestimate Syria's enabling factor for the Axis of Resistance. On the other hand, that enabling function has been diminished over the past year,” Haddad said. “It's not about whether this regime was playing a role that was extremely effective or not. It’s that its absence is going to allow for alternatives that will further undermine the Axis of Resistance.”

HTS and the West

Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the powerful militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the overthrow of Assad, has said his parents were forcibly displaced from their home in the Golan Heights in 1967. The nom-de-guerre he would later take, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, is a reference to the region. “We are from a family originally from the now-occupied Golan Heights. My grandfather, my father’s father, was displaced from the Golan in 1967, after the Israeli Zionist army entered the area,” Jolani said in a 2021 interview on PBS. He also said the second Palestinian intifada in the early 2000s was a pivotal event that shaped his politics. “I was 17 or 18 years old at the time and I started thinking about how to fulfill my duties defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders,” he said. However, HTS has not commented on the latest Israeli attacks nor have they explicitly threatened Israel in the past.

“For so many years, HTS and groups along the lines of HTS, have actually been quite reserved in terms of voicing anything regarding resistance to Israel,” Haddad said. “I have never seen anything of significance that is an official line of HTS regarding centering Palestine or threatening, challenging, or confronting Israel.”

Al-Jolani remains a U.S. government designated terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head and HTS is formally considered a terror organization by the U.S., U.K., and the UN. Though the Turkish government also classified HTS as a terror organization in 2018, Ankara has served as the group’s primary nation-state supporter. Politico reported that there is a “furious debate” in the Biden administration “over what to make of HTS” in Syria. “There is a huge scramble to see if, and how, and when we can delist HTS,” a U.S. official said. While some British officials have indicated that HTS would likely be delisted, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said it was still “far too early” to remove the terror designation. "We have all seen in other parts of history where we think there is a turning point - it turns out not necessarily to be the better future that we hope for," Starmer said. "We've got to make sure this is different."

HTS and Jolani have a long track record of brutality, torture, and extrajudicial executions. Jolani was a member of both Al-Qaeda and later ISIS and, even in the years since officially renouncing his ties to those groups, retained a reputation for violent authoritarianism during his time in charge of Idlib, where he consolidated HTS’s control of the anti-Assad “Salvation Government.”

In February, large protests broke out against HTS rule as people demanded an end to torture and other abuses, the release of political and religious prisoners and called for political and economic reforms and a return of land seized from local residents by HTS. Protesters also called for Al Jolani’s removal as head of the administration in Idlib. The UN documented beatings of detainees in HTS prisons and security facilities with pipes, cables and sticks, fingers broken and nails removed, prisoners held in solitary confinement for months. “HTS detained men, women, and children as young as seven. They included civilians detained for criticizing HTS and participating in the demonstrations,” a UN report issued in September found. “Pregnant women, women with small children, and girls were also reportedly detained.” Both Christian and Druze minorities faced persecution and Druze residents were subject to forced conversion to Sunni Islam.

In a series of interviews with Western media outlets over the past week, Jolani has sought to portray himself as a new man who has learned from the past and believes in a legal framework to ensure protection of minority rights. He made similar claims in 2021 for a PBS “Frontline” documentary, yet the abuses in areas under his control continued. “Although HTS has cut formal ties with al-Qaeda, engaged in self-promotional interviews with international media, and attempted to rebrand itself as a legitimate civic authority, it remains a potent source of a Salafi-jihadism that restricts the religious freedom of non-conforming Sunni Muslims and threatens the property, safety, and existence of religious minority groups such as Alawites, Christians, and Druze,” a U.S. government report on religious freedom in Syria concluded in 2022. HTS “continued to perpetrate some of the same human rights abuses—including torture, forced disappearance, rape and other sexual violence, and killing in detention.”

Jolani, who has insisted he now disavows such abuses and believes in protecting minority rights, has suggested that HTS does not seek to rule Syria and would dissolve itself as part of a process of rebuilding a central government. On Tuesday, Mohammed al-Bashir—who administered the HTS-led Salvation Government in northwest Syria—assumed the role of interim prime minister to coordinate the creation of a transitional government. The announcement was made after meetings that included Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, the last prime minister under Assad’s government. Whether HTS will dominate a new government remains an open question, particularly given the fractious nature of the armed groups that fought Assad’s rule in Syria, some of which have also fought one another. Should HTS consolidate its control of Syrian state institutions, it could represent a dismantling of the largely secular nature of the Syrian government that existed for decades under the rule of Assad and his father.

“HTS as a group generally and Jolani in particular has come to accept the idea that you can't really operate independently of the existing order of nation-states and somehow think you're just going to blaze through and dismantle all nation-states and set up a worldwide caliphate,” said Dr. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a scholar on Islamist groups who has monitored the evolution of HTS. “A close analogy I would give is Afghanistan's Taliban, because the Taliban has this Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. But they don't say, ‘Now we've got to go and push beyond the borders and take Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and push into China.’ No, they accept the idea of having ties with nation-states.” Al-Tamimi told Drop Site that Jolani “has definitely moved on and developed a more, I think, realistic understanding of, ‘How am I going to be taken seriously as an actor and how am I going to have a viable prospect [of] wielding political power?’ Because if you go down the Al-Qaeda and Islamic State route, ultimately you're just going to have the entire world against you.”

Ambassador Hof, the former U.S. envoy, told Drop Site he remains concerned about Jolani and HTS’s history with Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but believes the U.S. should engage with them. “Mr. Ahmad al-Sharaa and his colleagues are saying all the right things about inclusivity, protecting minorities, reconciliation, and reconstruction. The HTS human rights record in Idlib Province was not, however, a good one,” Hof said. “The U.S. should, I think, give him the benefit of the doubt and work closely with Turkey to influence him in the direction of inclusive, non-sectarian governance.”

Hof said that once the security situation stabilizes, the U.S. should dispatch a special envoy to Syria and reopen the U.S. embassy in Damascus. “There is a lot of uncertainty about how Syria will be governed in the post-Assad era,” he said. “But one thing is absolutely certain: Assad's departure permits Syrians to think about a better future, one featuring lives lived with dignity and freedom. Such thoughts were simply incredible and impossible with the Assad family and its entourage still on the scene.”

At the White House, President Joe Biden hailed U.S. policy in the region as having helped bring about Assad’s downfall. “Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” he said. “For the first time ever, neither Russia nor Iran nor Hezbollah could defend this abhorrent regime in Syria. And this is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine, Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United States.”

What went unmentioned in Biden’s celebration of the fall of Assad was the role the U.S. played in the Syrian civil war. In addition to openly supporting and arming Kurdish-led forces, the CIA ran a covert program to arm and train so-called “moderate rebels” from the Free Syrian Army in the early years of the war at an estimated cost of roughly $1 billion a year. Over the past decade, the U.S. has carried out airstrikes in Syria, primarily against ISIS forces, and is believed to have continued its clandestine training and arming of opposition forces.

In a statement on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. would recognize and support a Syrian government that would “respect the rights of minorities, facilitate the flow of humanitarian assistance to all in need, prevent Syria from being used as a base for terrorism or posing a threat to its neighbors, and ensure that any chemical or biological weapons stockpiles are secured and safely destroyed.”

On Sunday, the U.S. struck more than 75 targets associated with the Islamic State, according to U.S. Central Command. Meanwhile, some 900 U.S. troops remain deployed in Syria, including some working with Kurdish forces in the northeast of the country.

When asked if the U.S. was going to have any direct engagement with HTS, a senior administration official was vague. “On HTS, is there contact? I think it’s safe to say there’s contact with all Syrian groups as we work to do whatever we can to support the Syrians through a transition,” the official said at a background briefing Monday. “HTS, obviously, will be an important component of that, and I think we will intend to engage with them appropriately and with U.S. interests in mind.”

The U.S., Israel, Turkey and other outside nations will be wrestling to secure their influence over what comes next in Syria. Immediately after Assad’s ouster, scenes of elation erupted across the country, as prisoners were freed from dungeons and reunited with their families, while the roads from Turkey to Syria were clogged with thousands of Syrians looking to return home, despite all the uncertainties that lie ahead following more than half a century of Assad family rule.

“I try, as much as possible, to center the jubilation of the passing of somebody who's made the lives of millions of people miserable,” Haddad said. “But the fact is that as soon as this subsides, these upcoming sober moments will allow us to see what happened for what it is at the regional level, and that is the considerable diminution of any forces that resist the domination and hegemony of the United States and its allies in the region.”