Israel Launches Major Air Assault on Damascus

Israeli airstrikes and ground incursions threaten to destabilize Syria as it struggles to recover from a decade-plus civil war

On Tuesday night, Israel launched a massive aerial assault on Syria’s capital of Damascus, as well as other cities in the south of the country. Local media sources reported strikes near Damascus, as well as the cities of Quneitra and Daraa. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz confirmed the attacks, stating that, “[A]ny attempt by the Syrian regime forces and the country's terrorist organizations to establish themselves in the security zone in southern Syria will be met with fire.”

The “security zone” refers to a large swath of southern Syria that Israel is attempting to effectively annex. Indeed, the attacks came a day after a shocking announcement by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who demanded the “complete demilitarization” of southern Syria. The demand effectively banned the new government from deploying any troops south of its own capital, while laying the groundwork for an indefinite Israeli military occupation in the area.

“Take note: We will not allow HTS forces or the new Syrian army to enter the area south of Damascus,” Netanyahu said Sunday. “We demand the complete demilitarization of southern Syria.” On Monday, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar told a press conference in Brussels that the new Syrian government is “a jihadist Islamist terror group from Idlib that took Damascus by force.”

Journalist Ali Younes and I recently traveled to Syria for a round of interviews in an effort to understand where the new government is headed. The wild card remains Israel, the neighboring nation the new Syrian government has tried so far in vain to appease. Our dispatch – which turned out to be well timed, unfortunately for those in the region – is below.

Israeli tanks are seen at Al Hamadyeh region near the Golan Heights in Quneitra, Syria on January 16, 2025/ Ercin Erturk/Anadolu via Getty Images

Over a decade of civil war and sanctions have laid waste to much of Syria, crippling its economy and sending much of its population into exile. Already struggling to recover from this carnage, Syria is now facing attacks from Israel that threaten to destabilize the country.

On Tuesday night, a wave of Israeli airstrikes struck targets near Damascus and other cities in southern Syria, with initial reports indicating that at least one person was killed. The airstrikes were just the latest episode in a broader Israeli campaign aimed at crippling the military capacity of the new government, while sending ground forces to occupy swathes of territory south of the capital.

The Syrian government had previously called on the international community to force Israel to withdraw its troops from its territory—a request for intervention that had little chance of being realized. Recent threatening statements by Israeli officials have triggered protests across Syria, increasing political pressure on the government, led by Sunni Islamists affiliated with the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), to defend the country against increasingly brazen violations of its sovereignty.

Yet the ability of Syria—immiserated by a decade-plus war that killed hundreds of thousands, destroyed most of its major cities, displaced half its population, and saw its economy shrink by 85%—to take immediate steps to repel a far superior Israeli military power backed by the U.S. is questionable.

“In many ways the notion of resistance is dead,” said Joshua Landis, an expert on Syria and the head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “The government under [transitional president] Ahmed al-Sharaa clearly does not want a conflict with Israel.”

A glance at the bleak conditions in Syria underlines the daunting task now facing the new regime, as it seeks to hold together a country destroyed by war and sanctions while defending its sovereignty from an aggressive neighbor.

Once a vibrant hub of Palestinian life in Syria, Yarmouk, a district of Damascus, is today an eerie moonscape of bombed out buildings, uncleared rubble, and stray animals. Hasan Shafaamri, a Syrian-Palestinian who was raised in the area and who survived the fighting that decimated Yarmouk over the past decade of civil war, told Drop Site on a recent visit to the area that he is still haunted by the scenes that he witnessed, including attacks by soldiers and bombing raids by Syrian aircraft.

“A strike killed hundreds of innocent people who took shelter in a mosque,” he recalled. “The homes of people in the camp were basically reduced into piles of rubble.”

After over a decade of war, internal sieges, and crushing economic sanctions, Yarmouk is just one of many decimated areas of Syria. In Damascus alone, the suburbs of Darayya, Douma, Qaboun, and Jobar, have all suffered similar devastation, rendering them largely uninhabitable. Major cities like Homs and Aleppo suffered even more catastrophic damage during the war.

A destroyed commerical street in the Yarmouk district of Damascus / Murtaza Hussain

Syrian officials who spoke with Drop Site described a catastrophic situation inside the country following the war.

“Our education, health, and service sectors are basically destroyed,” one local Syrian government official told Drop Site this month. “We need immediate help in all of these sectors especially for the displaced Syrians who are living in tent cities battling cold weather and miserable conditions.”

The new regime has close ideological ties with the Turkish government, a connection that analysts say has alarmed Israel. Recent reports have also suggested that Turkey may sign a defense pact with the new government, including the establishment of military bases in the country.

Following the fall of the Assad regime, an Israeli government committee warned of a future war between Israel and Turkey over the Middle East, with a new Syrian government led by a Sunni Islamist regime likely to become a primary battleground. “Israel is very frightened that Turkey will become the dominant power and be effectively on Israel’s borders,” said Landis.

Yet the rhetorical support of regional countries has yet to translate into any changes on the ground in Syria, where the government is struggling to provide basic services necessary to stabilize the economy, while grappling with escalating political frustrations, including growing discontent and protests over Israeli attacks.

“Other than small and symbolic aid shipments, we have seen no official commitments from countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or others at this point,” the Syrian government official said, adding that foreign countries appear to be taking their cue from the position of Washington.

While the European Union this week announced the temporary easing of some energy and banking sanctions on Syria, the U.S. has held firm in maintaining the crushing Assad-era sanctions regime on the country. Though the sanctions ensure U.S. leverage over the country, they will likely make it impossible for Syrians to effectively rebuild, or repel the increasingly aggressive policies of the Israeli government.

A Legacy of Destruction

The state of Syria’s destroyed cities illustrate the grave challenges that the country will face in reconstituting its territory, defending its borders, or even offering the population a sense of basic stability.

Today the streets of once-prosperous central Damascus are full of homeless and displaced people, families of peddlers selling used shoes and clothes, and young men selling canisters of gasoline in plastic bottles. Historic districts of the city that once catered to tourists are largely shuttered, or have been repurposed to sell products needed for basic survival. Along with choking smog caused by the use of cheap, unrefined fuel for automobiles, only a few hours of electricity are available per day, leaving most of the city in darkness after nightfall.

The roads surrounding Yarmouk, which was the site of major battles between the Assad regime, local fighters loosely organized under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, and Islamic State terrorists, are dotted with buildings that were pulverized by airstrikes and tank shelling during the fighting. Streets lined with once-bustling storefronts have been almost entirely shuttered or hollowed out. Adding to the desolation, many of the walls of the surviving buildings were broken down to steal wiring and metal rebar, following a massive campaign of organized looting that locals say was carried out by military units under the command of the former government once it took control of the area.

The ruins of the Sayyida Sukayna shrine in the Damascus suburb of Darayya / Murtaza Hussain

“The fourth division went into the camp along with allied civilian people and looted all the furniture from the homes, then stole the doors and windows, then tiles and electrical wiring as well as steel rebar from the ceiling,” Hasan Shafaamri said, adding that government officials demanded daily bribes from the surviving residents for years even as they lived among the rubble without basic services.

This economic strip-mining of Syrian society continued right up until the collapse of the government last December. Mohamad al-Shaghori, who owns a small storefront restaurant in the area, said that under the former regime residents of the camp were required to present government-issued ID cards that controlled their movements.

“The regime established military checkpoints at the entrance and around the area and we had to show our ID cards to get in,” al-Shaghori said. “We had to pay them bribes just to get into the camp to our homes, and then pay them a bribe every time we brought any goods or materials in or out of the area.”

Yarmouk was founded as a Palestinian refugee camp before evolving, over decades, into an urbanized section of the capital. Many residents who were of Palestinian descent received support from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency established to aid Palestinians—money that residents said would mostly be stolen by the government.

“UNRWA would pay a family of five people $500 every three months, which, after transfer fees, would be reduced to about $350,” said Ahmed Sadiyeh, a Palestinian resident of Yarmouk. “But the Syrian regime would steal almost all of this amount before it reached any Palestinians. In the end, a family would end up with only $30.”

Like other residents, Sadiyeh expressed relief that Assad’s forces no longer controlled the area.

“We feel safer now,” said Sadiyeh. “We just want to be left alone, and we can rebuild this area.”

The new HTS-dominated government maintains a presence in Yarmouk and other suburbs of the city, with periodic patrols by armed men on motorcycles, as well as a local military headquarters staffed by fighters in a former Ba’ath Party office at the entrance to the district. When Drop Site visited Yarmouk and several other destroyed suburbs of Damascus, groups of fighters often passed by on patrol without interrupting the reporting.

Abu Mohamad, a resident of Darayya, which also suffered wide scale destruction and massacres during the war, told Drop Site that he and other surviving residents were relieved that the government had finally fled. Darayya had been the center of a nonviolent protest movement in 2011, which was confronted with brutal repression by the former regime. After some residents took up arms and expelled local officials, the government returned in force, carrying out widespread bombings and house-to-house massacres, including a five-day killing spree in the summer of 2012 that resulted in an estimated 700 deaths.

After years of fighting, as well as a years-long starvation siege, Darayya finally succumbed to the control of the regime in 2016. Yet few of its residents have returned, and almost nothing has been rebuilt. In a neighborhood near the center of the suburb, encircled by bombed-out apartment buildings, stands the destroyed shrine complex of Sayyida Sukayna, its golden dome collapsed inwards and two heavily damaged minarets pointing crookedly at the sky.

“We can speak freely now and we can go about our lives without fear from the regime's security services,” Abu Mohammad said. “The important thing is that injustice has gone.”

Syrian President Ahmad Al-Shara bids farewell to participants at the Syrian National Dialogue Conference on February 25, 2025 in Damascus, Syria / Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images

Abu Mohammad, along with many other Syrians and Syrian-Palestinians who spoke to Drop Site in Darayya and Yarmouk, rejected the claim put forward by Assad and his government that they had acted as a defender of the Palestinian cause, pointing to its military detente with Israel, as well as Syria's mass killings of Palestinians inside the country.

Yet many also expressed concern about the possible partition of the country, including a threatened secession of Kurdish areas in the north, as well as the creation of a de facto Israeli occupation regime in the south. “We are relieved that Assad is gone, but our future today is unknown, absolutely unknown, and we have new things to fear,” said Abu Khaled, a native of Darayya, who survived the war and drives a taxi in the area. “There are other countries that want a piece of Syria, and we know they will try to take advantage of our situation today.”

The new government is now struggling to rule over a destroyed and divided society still heavily contained by U.S. sanctions, with little military capacity of its own following the war and a campaign of Israeli airstrikes that began last December. Viewed with suspicion by the U.S. due to the past affiliation of many of its officials with designated terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and ISIS, the new Syrian government has now begun looking further abroad for new allies.

In recent weeks, Syria has begun doing diplomatic outreach to Russia—once a mortal enemy of the forces that now control the government in Damascus. During the civil war, Moscow carried out devastating airstrikes in opposition areas, including in Darayya and Yarmouk. Under Assad, Russia maintained military and naval bases inside the country—strategic assets whose current status is unclear but that Moscow would like to retain in the future.

In addition to reaching out to Turkey and the Gulf Arab states, the new Syrian government is now seeking to rebuild its relationship with Russia, as it seeks help to reassert control over its own territory, manage its economy under U.S. sanctions, and rearm to defend against future threats, including an expanding Israeli occupation that now threatens to become permanent.

“My hunch is that within a few years we will see al-Sharaa go back to Russia for weapons and other support,” said Landis. “America will be an enemy of this regime one way or another.”