Can Syria sit out the shadow war between Israel and Iran as Gaza bombardment intensifies?

Israeli military vehicles deployed in Majdal Shams in Golan Heights as smoke billowed from a Syrian position after Israeli bombardment in September. (AFP)
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Updated 02 November 2023
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Can Syria sit out the shadow war between Israel and Iran as Gaza bombardment intensifies?

  • Dependent on Tehran and Hezbollah, Syria’s Assad government may have little choice but to side with Hamas
  • Syrians say their “hearts are with Gaza,” but a decade of war and sanctions has left them too exhausted to fight

LONDON: Syrians are growing increasingly concerned that repeated Israeli airstrikes and airspace violations could drag their fractured homeland into the intensifying Israel-Hamas war, extending its decade-long existence as a proxy battleground.

In the three weeks since Hamas’ deadly assault on sites across the Israeli border of the Gaza Strip, Israel has launched attacks against international airports in Aleppo and Damascus, including simultaneous strikes on Oct. 12.

Nearly two weeks later, the Israeli Defense Forces killed eight soldiers during a raid in southern Syria, reportedly in response to rocket fire launched from Syrian territory the previous day.

On Monday, fighter jets again struck what were believed to be rocket launchers in Syria and Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, apparently in retaliation for attacks on Israeli territory.




A picture taken from Israel’s southern city of Sderot shows a fire erupting following Israeli shelling of the northern Gaza Strip, on October 29, 2023, amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement. (AFP)

“Since the 2006 Lebanon war, we have anticipated a direct confrontation with Israel or a full-blown US-Iran war on Syrian soil,” said Diana, 37, a UAE-based accountant whose name has been changed to maintain her anonymity. Having left the country in 2022 after losing hope of an economic recovery, she told Arab News that she feared “any war at this point might wipe my country off the map.” 

The uptick in IDF-led strikes builds on a history of hostilities since the eruption of Syria’s civil war in 2011. Israel has not been hesitant in launching hundreds of air raids in the Syrian north, often claiming that its targets were Iranian-backed forces and Hezbollah.

The argument is that Tehran, as one of Syria President Bashar Assad’s strongest allies, has deployed both its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and proxy forces to different parts of Syria, including near the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

Further to this, various actors including the US, Russia and Turkiye, as well as foreign and regional militias and terrorist groups, have waged battles on Syrian land. Together with tight economic sanctions, the impact has devastated the country’s infrastructure, economy and citizens.

In 2021, World Vision estimated that the economic toll of Syria’s war exceeded $1.2 trillion and, assuming the war ended that year, the burden was projected to increase until 2035 by an additional $1.7 trillion at current rates.




An Israeli soldier takes position near the Israeli military base of Har Dov on Mount Hermon, a strategic and fortified outpost at the crossroads between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, on October 10, 2023. (AFP)

Echoing Diana’s concerns is 48-year-old mother of two, Yara, whose name has also been changed. After leaving Syria in 2019 to start a new life in the UK, Yara thought the Syrian war was beginning to fade into the past, but recent developments in Gaza have made her “worry that the tumultuous years from 2012 to 2018, when the war was at its peak, might return.”

She told Arab News that she was now reliving the horrors of the 2018 clashes in Beit Sahem, which was close to her home in southeastern Damascus. 

“Syrians are tired of war,” Joshua Landis, who holds the Sandra Mackey chair and is the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, told Arab News. “For the last several years, Israel has been bombing Syria weekly. Syria is the main conduit for Iranian arms to reach Hezbollah in Lebanon. 

“The Syrian government would prefer not to be stuck in the middle of the Gaza war, but it has little choice as it is dependent on both Iran and Hezbollah. Iran provides it with most of its oil, evading strict US sanctions against oil imports to Syria. Hezbollah helped Syria win the war against opposition forces.” 

But Iran does not seem to be in favor of a wider Middle East conflict. During a UN General Assembly emergency meeting on Thursday, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, said his government did not welcome an expansion of the war, but warned that if the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip continues, the US “will not be spared from this fire.”

He also said it was “totally wrong” for Washington to blame Tehran for attacks on its forces without providing proof. This comes in the wake of US fighter jets carrying out strikes at two sites in eastern Syria last week that the Pentagon said were used by the IRGC and its proxies, after allegedly two new attacks on US forces in Syria and Iraq.




A drone carries a flag of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement above Aaramta bordering Israel on May 21, 2023 ahead of the anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. (AFP)

Iran, which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah, has denied any role in Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault but also described it as a victory for “the anti-Zionist resistance.” 

Landis said “Iranians do not appear to want an escalation.” He pointed out that “Iran and Hezbollah have both refused to establish red lines that would trigger their involvement in Gaza. All the same, they have made general threats, backing Hamas and the Palestinians.” 

One of the reasons that an all-on war against Israel “does not seem to be on the cards,” according to Landis, “is the poverty of the ‘resistance states,’” which include Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza.

INNUMBERS

  • 2.3% Projected contraction of Syria’s real GDP in 2023.
  • 60% Projected increase in inflation rate this year.
  • 80% Syrian pound’s loss of value in May-August period.

Syria’s economy is “completely broken” while Lebanon’s economy has been in free fall since 2019, when its banks and government fell into bankruptcy, he said. Iraq and Iran are also struggling, the latter being “eager to get out of sanctions.”

Be that as it may, many Syrians, inside their home country and abroad, have been expressing solidarity with Gaza through demonstrations and social media. Syrian aid and civil society organizations, including Molham Team and Mart, showed support for the Palestinians by launching donations and educational campaigns. 

Marwan Alrez, the head of Mart Group, posted a video on Instagram in which he said that shared pain and loss may be the main reason for Syrians standing in solidarity with Palestinians. Over 12 years of conflict and isolation from the rest of the world have displaced more than half of the population, pushed over 90 percent under the poverty line, and killed more than 306,000, according to UN figures. 

“Syrians feel a strong sense of affinity to Palestinians,” said Landis. “Syrians are horrified by the brutal retribution that Israel is inflicting on Gazans. Despite normally being supportive of any government that bombs Syrian forces and Iranian surrogates in the region, even Syrian opposition groups have begun to speak out against Israel. Syrians are torn. Their hearts are with the Gazans, but they are exhausted by war.” 




A convoy of vehicles of the United Nation drive through damaged buildings in the Syrian town of Quneitra, in the Golan Heights on March 26, 2019. (AFP)

Yara said that news images of Palestinian women in their prayer dresses evoked painful memories of clashes near her home in Syria. “The authorities had asked us to evacuate, but there was nowhere for us to go,” she recounted. 

Describing how she and her family weathered those perilous times, Yara said: “I would wear my prayer set and gather with my children, mother and husband in one room — the safest in our house — so as to be together if we die or get trapped under rubble. 

“I doubt what is left of my country can survive another war.”

In emailed comments to Arab News, Camille Alexandre Otrakji, a Syrian-Canadian analyst, said ordinary Syrians clearly recognize the exhaustion of their nation’s economic resources and the diminished capabilities of their armed forces as a result of more than a decade of conflict.

“However, there are elements that desire the involvement of the entire Axis of Resistance in the ongoing struggle, even though Syria cannot — and should not be expected to — bear this burden,” Otrakji said.




Syrian army soldiers raised the national flag in Quneitra in 2018, four years after losing control of the area to rebels. (AFP)

Landis, the Syria expert, does not rule out the eruption of a regional conflict, citing Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel as a cautionary tale. 

“No one thought that Hamas had the capability to inflict such a heavy blow on Israel,” he told Arab News.

“Hezbollah, which has built up an inventory of over 100,000 rockets, could inflict considerable pain on north Israel. We got an inkling of its capabilities in the 2006 war with Israel. Israel devastated Lebanon with its wide-ranging bombing raids, which were meant to ‘take Lebanon back to the Middle Ages,’ according to one Israeli general.

“They seem to have worked in creating a deterrent, but one never knows how long that deterrent will last. Everyone thought that Hamas had been deterred and was wrong. In Operation Cast Led, Israel inflicted a 100-to-1 kill ratio on Gazans and here we are — Hamas was not deterred.”

 


Syria’s ‘Caesar’ whistleblower unveils identity

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Syria’s ‘Caesar’ whistleblower unveils identity

BEIRUT: A Syrian whistleblower, who smuggled tens of thousands of pictures depicting torture under Bashar Assad, on Thursday revealed his identity for the first time, two months after the longtime ruler was toppled.
“I am First Lt. Farid Al-Madhan, the (former) head of the forensic evidence department at the military police in Damascus, known as Caesar,” he said in a televised interview with Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera.
Identified at the time only as a Syrian military photographer under the pseudonym Caesar, he had fled the country in 2013, taking with him some 55,000 graphic images taken between 2011 and 2013.
Describing himself during the interview as a “son of a free Syria,” he said he was from the city of Daraa, “the cradle of the Syrian revolution.”
Following the outbreak of Syria’s civil war in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests, he said he was tasked with “taking pictures of victims of detention.”
These included “old men, women and children, who were detained at security checkpoints in Damascus, and from protest squares that called for freedom and dignity,” said Madhan, who added that he currently resides in France.
“They were detained, tortured and killed in bloody, systematic ways and their bodies were transferred to military morgues to be photographed and taken to mass graves,” he continued.
He said he postponed his defection from the government forces and fleeing the country in order to be able to “collect the largest number of pictures documenting and incriminating the Syrian regime apparatuses of committing crimes against humanity.”
He said the pictures were smuggled in a flash drive that he sometimes hid in his socks or a bundle of bread to escape government security checkpoints or those of the opposition.
The photos, authenticated by experts, show corpses tortured and starved to death in Syrian prisons.
Some people had their eyes gouged out. The photos showed emaciated bodies, people with wounds on the back or stomach, and also a picture of hundreds of corpses in a shed surrounded by plastic bags used for burials.
Assad’s government said only that the pictures were “political.”
But Caesar testified to a US Congress committee and his photographs inspired a 2020 US law which imposed economic sanctions on Syria and judicial proceedings in Europe against Assad’s entourage.
Germany, the Netherlands and France have since 2022 convicted several top officials from the Syrian intelligence service and militias.


Doubling down on his proposal, Trump says Israel would hand over Gaza to the US after fighting is over

Updated 42 sec ago
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Doubling down on his proposal, Trump says Israel would hand over Gaza to the US after fighting is over

  • No American troops would be needed on the ground, the US president wrote his Truth Social web platform
  • Israel’s defense chief suggests Spain, Ireland, Norway, and others opposed to military operations in Gaza should take in the Palestinians
  • Trump’s top diplomat said that people would have to live elsewhere while Gaza was being rebuilt

JERUSALEM/WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Thursday Israel would hand over Gaza to the United States after fighting was over and the enclave’s population was already resettled elsewhere, which he said meant no US troops would be needed on the ground.
A day after worldwide condemnation of Trump’s announcement that he aimed to take over and develop the Gaza Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” Israel ordered its army to prepare to allow the “voluntary departure” of Gaza Palestinians.
Trump, who had previously declined to rule out deploying US troops to the small coastal territory, clarified his idea in comments on his Truth Social web platform.
“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” he said. Palestinians “would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.” He added: “No soldiers by the US would be needed!“
Earlier, amid a tide of support in Israel for what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump’s “remarkable” proposal, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he had ordered the army to prepare a plan to allow Gaza residents who wished to leave to exit the enclave voluntarily.
“I welcome President Trump’s bold plan. Gaza residents should be allowed the freedom to leave and emigrate, as is the norm around the world,” Katz said on X.
He said his plan would include exit options via land crossings, as well as special arrangements for departure by sea and air.
Trump, a real-estate-developer-turned-politician, sparked anger around the Middle East with his unexpected announcement on Tuesday, just as Israel and Hamas were expected to begin talks in Doha on the second stage of a ceasefire deal for Gaza, intended to open the way for a full withdrawal of Israeli forces, a further release of hostages and an end to a nearly 16-month-old war.

Regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia rebuffed the proposal outright and Jordan’s King Abdullah, who will meet Trump at the White House next week, said on Wednesday he rejected any attempts to annex land and displace Palestinians.
Egypt also weighed in, saying it would not be part of any proposal to displace Palestinians from neighboring Gaza, where residents reacted with fury to the suggestion.
“We will not sell our land for you, real estate developer. We are hungry, homeless, and desperate but we are not collaborators,” said Abdel Ghani, a father of four living with his family in the ruins of their Gaza City home. “If (Trump) wants to help, let him come and rebuild for us here.”
It was unclear whether Trump would go ahead with his proposal or, in keeping with his self-image as a shrewd dealmaker, has simply laid out an extreme position as a bargaining tactic. His first term in 2017-21 was replete with what critics said were over-the-top foreign policy pronouncements, many of which were never implemented.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Thursday that people would have to live elsewhere while Gaza was rebuilt. He did not say whether they would be able to return under Trump’s plan to develop the enclave, home to more than 2 million Palestinians.
Axios reported Rubio planned to visit the Middle East in mid-February with an itinerary that includes Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Displacement
What effect Trump’s shock proposal may have on the ceasefire talks remains unclear. Only 13 of a group of 33 Israeli hostages due for release in the first phase have so far been returned, with three more due to come out on Saturday. Five Thai hostages have also been released.
Hamas official Basem Naim accused Israel’s defense minister of trying to cover up “for a state that has failed to achieve any of its objectives in the war on Gaza,” and said Palestinians are too attached to their land to ever leave.
Displacement of Palestinians has been one of the most sensitive issues in the Middle East for decades. Forced or coerced displacement of a population under military occupation is a war crime, banned under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

Details of how any such plan might work have been vague. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said different thinking was needed on Gaza’s future but that any departures would have to be voluntary and states would have to be willing to take them.
“We don’t have details yet, but we can talk about principles,” Saar told a press conference with his Italian counterpart Antonio Tajani. “Everything must be based on the free will of (the) individual and, on the other hand, of a will of a state that is ready to absorb,” he said.
A number of far-right Israeli politicians have openly called for Palestinians to be moved from Gaza and there was strong support for Trump’s push among both security hawks and the Jewish settler movement, which wants to reclaim land in Gaza used for Jewish settlements until 2005.
Giora Eiland, an Israeli former general who attracted wide attention in an earlier stage of the war with his “Generals’ Plan” for a forced displacement of people from northern Gaza, said Trump’s plan was logical and aid should not be allowed to reach displaced people returning to northern Gaza.
Israel’s military campaign has killed tens of thousands of people since Hamas’ October 7, 2023, cross-border attack on Israel touched off the war, and has forced Palestinians to repeatedly move around within Gaza in search of safety.
But many say they will never leave the enclave because they fear permanent displacement, like the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands were dispossessed from homes in the war at the birth of the state of Israel in 1948.
Katz said countries that have opposed Israel’s military operations in Gaza should take in the Palestinians.
“Countries like Spain, Ireland, Norway, and others, which have levelled accusations and false claims against Israel over its actions in Gaza, are legally obligated to allow any Gaza resident to enter their territories,” he said.


Morocco foils 78,685 migrant attempts to reach Europe in 2024

Updated 06 February 2025
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Morocco foils 78,685 migrant attempts to reach Europe in 2024

RABAT: Morocco stopped 78,685 migrants from illegally crossing into EU territory in 2024, up 4.6 percent from a year earlier, the Interior Ministry said on Thursday.

The figures highlight “growing migratory pressure in an unstable regional environment,” the ministry said in response to questions.

Among the migrants, 58 percent were from West Africa, 12 percent from North Africa where Morocco is located, and 9 percent from East and Central Africa, it said.

Years of armed conflict across Africa’s Sahel region, unemployment, and the impact of climate change on farming communities are among the reasons driving migrants toward Europe.

Morocco and neighboring EU member Spain have strengthened cooperation against undocumented migration since they patched a separate diplomatic feud in 2022.

The North African country has for long been a major launch pad for African migrants aiming to reach Europe through the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, or by jumping the fence surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in northern Morocco.

Last year, there were 14 group attempts to cross into Ceuta and Melilla, compared with six in 2023, the ministry said.

Moroccan authorities rescued 18,645 would-be migrants from unseaworthy boats in 2024, up 10.8 percent from 2023, it said.

Last month as many as 50 migrants may have drowned in the latest deadly wreck involving people trying to make the Atlantic crossing from West Africa to Spain’s Canary Islands, a migrant rights group said.


West Bank healthcare ‘in a state of perpetual emergency’: MSF

Updated 06 February 2025
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West Bank healthcare ‘in a state of perpetual emergency’: MSF

  • Most clinics and hospitals are running at significantly reduced levels, medical charity says

GENEVA: The healthcare system in the occupied West Bank has been in “a state of perpetual emergency” since October 2023, the Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, group said in a new report published on Thursday.

“A dramatic escalation in violence, marked by prolonged Israeli military incursions and stricter movement restrictions ... have severely hindered access to essential services, particularly health care, exacerbating already dire living conditions for many Palestinians,” it said.

Violence in the region soared after the attack on Israel in October 2023, which triggered a massive retaliation by Israel that has leveled much of Gaza.

“Since Oct. 7, 2023, the West Bank has seen a dramatic escalation in violence, marked by prolonged Israeli military incursions and stricter movement restrictions,” it said.

The report examined “the attacks and the obstructions of healthcare in a context of what has been described by the ICJ (International Criminal Court) as segregation and apartheid.”

It revealed “a pattern of systematic interference by Israeli forces and settlers in emergency health care delivery.”

The Palestinian Health Ministry says Israeli troops and settlers have killed at least 884 Palestinians, including many militants, in the West Bank since the Gaza war began on Oct. 7, 2023.

Over the same period, at least 32 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military raids in the territory, official Israeli figures show.

Preventing Palestinians from accessing healtcare was “part of a wider system of collective punishment imposed by Israel, under the guise of its crackdown on armed Palestinian men,” MSF said.

“The already-strained Palestinian healthcare system in the West Bank has been further weakened since October 2023 and is facing significant budget constraints,” it said.

Nearly half the essential medications are out of stock, and health workers have not been paid in a year, the report said, adding that “most clinics and hospitals are running at significantly reduced levels.”

“Access to health care is severely impeded by a sprawling system of checkpoints and roadblocks that obstruct ambulance movements, compounded by the escalation of violent military raids involving the use of disproportionate tactics.”

This is compounded by “frequent attacks on medical personnel and facilities ... Hospitals and healthcare structures are often encircled by military forces, with troops sometimes occupying the buildings themselves, compounding the risks to both patients and staff.”

Violence from settlers often exacerbates these dire conditions, it said.

MSF called on Israel to stop its “disproportionate use of force” in the West Bank, including on medical facilities and against medical personnel.

It called for independent probes into past such attacks, for Israel to facilitate medical access to those in need, and to allow the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA to be allowed to continue its work.

Israeli military offensives in two West Bank refugee camps have displaced nearly 5,500 Palestinian families since December, local and UN officials said this week, amid escalating violence in the occupied territory.

Jonathan Fowler, spokesman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said an estimated 2,450 to 3,000 families have been displaced from the Tulkarem refugee camp.

Faisal Salama, head of the camp’s popular committee, estimated that 80 percent of its 15,000 residents had been displaced.

Both Salama and Fowler said that obtaining precise figures was challenging because of the security situation within the camp and its fluctuating population.

“The displaced people from the camp are scattered in the suburbs and in the city of Tulkarem itself,” Salama said.

He said that six people had been killed and dozens wounded since the offensive began on Jan. 25.

“The bombing of residential homes in the camp continues, along with destruction and bulldozing of everything.”

Salama also reported that the violence has severely restricted the movement of goods into the camp.


Over 10,000 aid trucks have entered Gaza since ceasefire: UN

Updated 06 February 2025
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Over 10,000 aid trucks have entered Gaza since ceasefire: UN

GENEVA: More than 10,000 aid trucks have crossed into Gaza since a fragile ceasefire took hold on Jan. 19, the UN humanitarian chief said on Thursday.

“We’ve moved over 10,000 trucks in the two weeks since the ceasefire, a massive surge,” Tom Fletcher said on X.

The UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator added that he himself was “about to cross into northern Gaza with a convoy of aid.”

“Thank you to the many people making it possible to get these trucks of vital, lifesaving food, medicine, and tents through,” he said.

His comments come as Israel and Hamas prepare to negotiate the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, which has paused 15 months of relentless fighting and bombing unleashed after the deadly Oct. 7, 2023 attack.

With just a trickle of aid coming into the territory before the ceasefire deal, international aid organizations repeatedly reported crisis levels of hunger in the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip and warned of looming famine.

The truce has led to a surge of food, fuel, medical, and other aid being allowed into Gaza and enabled people displaced by the war to return to the north of the Palestinian territory.

Under the Gaza truce’s ongoing 42-day first phase, 18 hostages have meanwhile been freed so far in exchange for some 600 mostly Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

The Health Ministry in Gaza said Thursday that the death toll from the war in the Palestinian territory had reached 47,583.

The number of dead, published by the ministry, continues to rise every day as bodies discovered under the rubble are identified or people die from earlier wounds.

During the past 24 hours, 31 further deaths were recorded by the ministry, which also registered 111,633 wounded from the war.