Syria Golan detentions fuel fury at Israeli forces, doubts in new government

QUNEITRA, Syria — Ibrahim was visiting his uncle's home in a village in Quneitra, in southwestern Syria, in July of last year when dozens of Israeli troops and their military dogs stormed the place at 3 a.m. Recounting the ordeal to Al-Monitor, Ibrahim said masked Israeli intelligence officers grilled him about his "connections" to Islamic State and Hezbollah. He had none and knew nothing of either. "I am an orphan. I am only 17. I live with my grandma and two brothers and work in a factory," Ibrahim told them. They bound his wrists with zip ties and hauled him to their base in the nearby Israeli-occupied village of Tell Ahmar al-Gharbi, in Syria’s Golan region near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, he said. So began 13 months of incommunicado detention, marked by what he described as physical and psychological torture in a string of Israeli prisons. It left Ibrahim despising Israel and disillusioned with his own government for failing to protect him.

Such feelings of impotence and abandonment are pervasive across Quneitra, where Israel's continued attacks, including drone and artillery strikes, have terrorized communities and paralyzed an economy that depends heavily on agriculture.

Figures vary, but rights monitors say Israeli security forces have detained more than 240 Syrians — and transferred an unconfirmed number to Israel, in what rights groups describe as illegal renditions — since the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in December 2024. At least 200 had been freed as of August 2026, but over 40 remain unaccounted for. They are among the victims of sustained Israeli military operations affecting mainly Sunni Arab communities on the fringes of the buffer zone separating Syria from Israel, which the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) has monitored since 1974, seven years after Israel occupied the Golan Heights.

Israeli forces pushed into the buffer zone, seizing the strategic Mount Hermon, just as Sunni opposition forces led by the country's now interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, toppled Assad. Within 48 hours, Israeli fighter jets and naval vessels had destroyed as much as 80% of Syria's military assets, including air defense systems, missile depots, aircraft and tanks, according to an Israeli military assessment.

Israel still strikes Syria and even bombed the Defense Ministry in Damascus last summer. The Israeli military says its operations are aimed at removing threats to Israel, saying in a Sept. 23 statement that troops had detained suspects, dismantled “terrorist infrastructure” and seized weapons. Analysts say the broader aim is to keep the country weak and fractured and to stop Turkish forces in the north from creeping south. The moves come amid a broader Israeli campaign of preemptive attacks against real and perceived enemies following Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Wedged between southern Lebanon and northern Israel, the Quneitra region is seen as especially menacing because of its location and the suspected presence of Hezbollah, Assad regime and Islamic State (ISIS) remnants. Some detainees have indeed proved to be linked to such groups, but by and large the renditions amount to a "fishing campaign" in which Israel hopes to gather information and recruit informants, according to Elizabeth Tsurkov, an Israeli-Russian researcher.

Detainee Na’el al-Mishal’s wife, Esra, with their son Ahmed in the village of Jaba, Syria, Sept. 18, 2026. (Amberin Zaman/Al-Monitor)

"The Israeli actions are best explained as some kind of overreaction deriving from a security mindset that says 'we have to preempt any threat,'" Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an independent researcher based in Syria, told Al-Monitor. "I think it's a very counterproductive one," he added. Carmit Valensi, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank in Tel Aviv, agreed. "We are trying to eliminate potential threats, but our actions generate resentment and risks that could lead to the same threat that we sought to avoid," she told Al-Monitor.

Israeli forces have killed at least 36 Syrians in the area over the past 18 months: 13 in Beit Jinn, nine in Nawa and seven in Kuwayya, according to an in-depth investigation of the incursions published last week by Dropsite News, an independent news organization. Some died in clashes as villagers began to push back, raising concerns that continued operations could fuel further local resistance. The Israeli military has not publicly released figures on Syrian deaths in the operations.

Don't ask, don't tell

The village of Samdaniya Gharbiya sits at the foot of rolling ocher hills that climb to Mount Hermon. It lies within direct striking range of the Israeli base where Ibrahim was first taken. Ahmed al-Mishal, a local Sunni Arab, stands beside the carcass of a small mosque destroyed by Assad's forces in clashes with locals, who he says backed the Sunni rebels during the country's 14-year civil war. "We could not enjoy the taste of victory because of Israel," the retired veterinarian told Al-Monitor in an interview on Sept. 18. His son Na'el, a 27-year-old electrician, was taken by Israeli forces on Dec. 21, 2024, just two months after regime operatives had detained him on what Mishal says were bogus charges leveled by an aggrieved neighbor, who claimed he had rigged booby traps to blow up Assad's troops. He was freed after Mishal paid a hefty ransom.

The interior of a mosque in Samdaniya Gharbiya that was destroyed during clashes between Assad’s forces and local residents during Syria’s civil war, Sept. 18, 2026. (Amberin Zaman/Al-Monitor)

Na'el's wife, Esra, says Israeli forces encircled the family home in large numbers, barking orders in broken Arabic over megaphones to hand over any weapons. "I told them I don't even have a sharp knife," Esra said. The soldiers knew exactly whom they were looking for, she said: Na'el and Esra's brother, Ali. "They separated the men from the women and made the men strip down to their underwear, then asked their names," she recalled. Na'el was beaten as he was dragged away.

She was three months pregnant at the time. So was Ali's wife, Ghada. "They pointed their guns at me. I lost the baby," the mother of four told Al-Monitor. Esra's baby, another boy, survived.

Asked what the detainees are accused of, family members invariably profess stony-faced ignorance. "We don't know." Were they affiliated with any armed groups? "No." Those who are freed say much the same: The Israeli forces did not question them about membership of any organization or about much of anything, leaving them baffled as to why they were detained in the first place.

The hostility marks a stark reversal from the early years of Syria's civil war, when Israel provided humanitarian aid to communities along the Golan border, including medical treatment for thousands of wounded and sick Syrians.

The story of Basher al-Jassem, a 23-year-old Sunni Arab from the village of Ruwayhinah, is typical. Detained by Israeli soldiers on Aug. 28, 2025, and freed on Sept. 15 this year, he answered a reporter's questions three days after his release in a robotic monotone. He had not been accused of anything. He had not been maltreated in the two prisons where he was held for 13 months: Sde Teiman military prison in the Negev desert and Jalama, between Haifa and Nazareth. His message was, in fact, clear. "Don't ask me any questions you know I can't answer."

Basher al-Jassem, a 23-year-old Sunni Arab from the village of Ruwayhinah, who was detained by Israeli forces in August 2025. (Amberin Zaman/Al-Monitor)

The reason is simple. Both the Israelis and the Syrian security forces to whom the detainees are handed over have expressly forbidden them and their families from speaking to anyone, above all the media, about their ordeal. Many rightly fear reprisals and even re-arrest if they fail to comply.

But Ibrahim, a pseudonym, is among a handful who have decided to speak out so that the world may learn of the brutality he and others have been made to endure. After eight days of anguished reflection, he told his story to Al-Monitor.

Welcome to the madhouse

At the Israeli base, Ibrahim said his captors replaced the plastic cuffs on him and eight other detainees from the village with metal ones. All were blindfolded, shoved into a vehicle and driven to Sde Teiman. When they arrived after a three-and-a-half-hour ride, a prison guard, Ibrahim recalled, sneered, "Welcome to the madhouse."

The blindfold stayed on for 15 days. The cuffs were not removed, not even when the boy wanted to eat, pray or use the toilet. "They gave us yellow shirts and gray trousers and transferred us to a ward covered solely with wire mesh. They called it 'the cage.' Pigeons and other birds defecated on us." Dogs constantly burst into the cell, sowing terror. "I developed scabies and a skin rash, and it was almost impossible to sleep," the boy recalled.

Life improved markedly a month later, when they were transferred to Ofer prison in the West Bank. He said that while Druze security guards beat and cursed them on the way, once at Ofer, the cuffs and blindfolds came off. They were given edible meals, allowed to talk and even to shave. The respite was short-lived. Some 45 days later, they were taken back to Sde Teiman, where he said things were even more horrific than before. After the start of the Iran conflict in February, Ibrahim said guards would enter their cell, order them to lie on their stomachs and throw stun grenades at them while sounding sirens. During interrogations about his neighbors, their affiliations and the location and movements of Syrian government security officials in the area, "I was treated like an animal. I was shackled to an iron rail. When I asked for water, they would throw it violently in my face and constantly shout 'shut up, shut up,'" he told Al-Monitor.

An Israeli military installation near Samdaniya Gharbiya, photographed Sept. 18, 2026. (Amberin Zaman/Al-Monitor)

That was not all. The Syrians were taken to a place outside the prison called the disco. Deafening music played around the clock, "leaving us in a state of terror." Ibrahim said his interrogators were trying to recruit them as informants. The boy refused. The abuse went on for a full 13 months, he said. The Israeli military set him free in August this year after making him sign a document stating that he had been treated well.

Why had this happened? Why had his young life been ruined in this way?

No pulling back

Back in Samdaniya Gharbiya, Mishal, the veterinarian whose son is still in Israeli detention, believes he knows the answer. "Quneitra is very strategic, and it is a chip in the bargaining between Israel and our leaders. Israel wants it all." He said this means making life so hellish for locals that they pack up and leave, allowing Israel to cement its presence not only in the buffer zone but beyond it.

In a speech at the UN last week, Sharaa lashed out at Israel's occupation of southern Syria, insisting that the Golan Heights were an inseparable part of his country. Israel, the Syrian leader noted, had conducted more than 500 air and artillery strikes, carried out 1,200 land incursions and detained nearly 300 people.

Syria wants nothing more than an accommodation with Israel that would end the attacks. American-mediated talks have spurred some intelligence cooperation between the sides. But Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, and other Israeli leaders say they will not withdraw to the lines of Dec. 8, 2024, as Sharaa demands. Citing a "jihadist threat," Israel Katz, the defense minister, said Israel would not pull back from areas occupied after Assad's fall and called the Golan Heights "an eternal part of Israel."

That may explain why in January, the Israeli army flew crop-dusters over border regions of Lebanon and Syria, spraying pesticides on fields where wheat, barley, vegetables and fruit are traditionally grown, as PAX, a Dutch nongovernmental organization specializing in conflict resolution, documented the same month. Last year, Israeli forces also began felling trees across 9 square kilometers in Quneitra. Sunni Arabs were prevented from collecting the logs for firewood; Druze from the town of Haddar, further north, were instead authorized to do so in the nearby village of Jubatha al-Khashab, deepening communal tensions, according to PAX's report. "It's a means of rendering agriculture less and less viable in the area," Peter Schwarzstein, a researcher who studies the impact of conflict on the environment, told Al-Monitor. "What is happening there fits into the wider context of the weaponization of natural resources," he said.

Safa Safadi, a local activist, is mobilizing the community to lobby the government and international bodies, including UNDOF, for a solution. So far, her efforts, including sit-ins outside UNDOF offices and government buildings in Damascus, have proved fruitless. "We went to the People's Palace three months ago," Na’el’s wife, Esra, recalled. "We were kicked out. They told us, 'You are not allowed here,'" she said of the guards at Sharaa's palace. Ibrahim says his 80-year-old granny was among the protesters. "The Israelis have escalated in recent days. The messages between Israel and our government are sent through our lands," Safadi told Al-Monitor.

She was in her native Beit Jinn on the night that Israeli soldiers, who were hunting for Jamaa Islamiya militants, killed 13 villagers after coming under fire, according to the BBC. The Syrian Foreign Ministry said more than 10 civilians had died, among them two girls, ages 4 and 17, and a 10-year-old boy. Israeli attack helicopters sent to rescue the soldiers' wounded dropped bombs on the village, including on her home, she said. Nobody was killed, "but I can no longer sleep," she added.

Safadi resolved to start documenting Israeli abuses and keeping a log of the detainees that very night. In an interview on Sept. 22, she said she had counted 46 still in Israeli custody. Like many, she laments what she calls the government's failure to stop the Israeli attacks. "Our government can't do anything. Maybe Trump can," she said.

Meanwhile, the thinness of the Syrian military presence in the area is feeding conspiracy theories among some locals that Sharaa is not entirely unhappy to see Israel hunting their shared enemies in Hezbollah, ISIS and Assad loyalists. In truth, the Syrian army remains vastly outmatched by Israel.

Last week, Israeli forces allegedly assaulted a shepherd and ran over and killed several of his sheep in the village of Al Rafid, a kilometer from an Israeli base, local outlets reported. The Sijil Center, a Syrian rights-monitoring group, has tracked nine Israeli bases erected since December 2024 in an area stretching from Mount Hermon in the north to the Yarmouk River on the southern border with Jordan, Dropsite reported.

Mohammed al-Fahad, a farmer in Al Rafid, told Al-Monitor that Israeli incursions "happen every day." "They put up signs saying 'Don't approach.' It's harsh for me to see soldiers from another country patrolling my own lands."

Ibrahim says he has no dreams left and "no future." Yet he still finds solace in the love of his grandmother, Warda. When Syrian security forces freed him and returned him home, "She hugged me and told me there was no room big enough to fit the joy that she felt at my release."

Independent Syrian journalist Fadi Ibrahim contributed to this report.