[edit]
Prehistory[edit]
The Venus of Berekhat Ram, a pebble from the Lower Paleolithic era found in the Golan Heights, may have been carved by Homo erectus between 700,000 and 230,000 BCE.
Bronze Age[edit]
The southern Golan saw a rise in settlements from the 2nd millennium BCE onwards. These were small settlements located on the slopes overlooking the Sea of Galilee or nearby gorges. They may correspond to the "cities of the Land of Ga[šu]ru" mentioned in Amarna Letter #256.5, written by the prince of Pihilu (Pella). This suggests a different form of political organization compared to the prevalent city-states of the region, such as Hatzor to the west and Ashteroth to the east. The Golan had numerous settlements in the Middle Bronze Age until they were largely destroyed by Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmose III in the mid 2nd millennium BCE. Following this, the level of habitation in the area decreased.
Iron Age[edit]
Following the Late Bronze Age collapse, the kingdom of Geshur emerged from the Golan, likely a continuation of the earlier "Land of Garu". The Hebrew Bible mentions it as a distinct entity during the reign of David (10th century BCE). David's marriage to Maacha, daughter of Talmai, the king of Geshur, supports a dynastic alliance with Israel. However, by the mid-9th century BCE, Aram-Damascus absorbed Geshur into its expanding territory. Aram-Damascus' rivalry with the Kingdom of Israel led to numerous military clashes in the Golan and Gilead regions throughout the 9th and 8th centuries BCE. In the Books of Kings (1 Kings 20:26–30), the Bible recounts how Ahab, king of Israel, defeated Ben-Hadad I of Damascus at Aphek, a location possibly corresponding to the modern-day Afik, near the Sea of Galilee.
Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian periods[edit]
During the 8th century BCE, the Assyrians conquered the region, incorporating it into the province of Qarnayim, likely including Damascus as well. This period was succeeded by the Babylonian and the Achaemenid Empire. According to the Mosaic of Rehob, the Achaemenid Empire allowed the region to be resettled by returning Jewish exiles from the Babylonian Captivity in the 5th century BCE. Archaeological surveys have found no remains indicating any kind of habitation between the 6th and 3rd centuries BCE.
Hellenistic and early Roman periods[edit]
Temple of Pan at Banias and the white-domed shrine of Nabi Khadr in the background
The Golan Heights, along with the rest of the region, came under the control of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, following the Battle of Issus. Following Alexander's death, the Golan came under the domination of the Macedonian general Seleucus and remained part of the Seleucid Empire for most of the next two centuries. In the middle of the 2nd century BCE, Itureans moved into the Golan, occupying more than one hundred locations in the region. Iturean stones and pottery have been found in the area. Itureans also built several temples, one of them in function up until the Islamic conquest.
Around 83–81 BCE, the Golan was captured by the Hasmonean king and high priest Alexander Jannaeus, annexing the area to the Hasmonean kingdom of Judaea. Following this conquest, the Hasmoneans encouraged Jewish migrants from Judea to settle in the Golan. Most scholars agree that this settlement began after the Hasmonean conquest, though it might have started earlier, probably in the mid-2nd century BCE. Over the next century, Jewish settlement in the Golan and nearby regions became widespread, reaching north to Damascus and east to Naveh.
Ruins of the ancient Jewish city of Gamla, home to one of the earliest known synagogues. The city was besieged and destroyed by the Romans in 71 CE, during the First Jewish–Roman War.
When Herod the Great ascended to power in Judaea during the latter half of the first century BCE, the region as far as Trachonitis, Batanea and Auranitis was put under his control by Augustus Caesar. Following Herod's death in 4 BCE, Augustus Caesar adjudicated that the Golan fell within the Tetrarchy of Herod's son, Herod Philip I. The capital of Jewish Galaunitis, Gamla, was a prominent city and major stronghold. It housed one of the earliest known synagogues, believed to have been constructed in the late 1st century BC, while the Temple in Jerusalem was still standing.
After Philip's death in 34 CE, the Romans absorbed the Golan into the province of Syria, but Caligula restored the territory to Herod's grandson Agrippa in 37. Following Agrippa's death in 44, the Romans again annexed the Golan to Syria, promptly to return it again when Claudius granted control of the Golan to Agrippa II, the son of Agrippa I, in 53.
By the time of the Great Jewish revolt, which began in 66 CE, part of the Golan Heights was predominantly inhabited by Jews. According to the account of Josephus, the western and central Golan were densely populated with cities that emerged on fertile stony soil. After the Roman suppression of the Jews during the First Jewish–Roman War of the 60s and 70s CE and following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, many Jews sought refuge to the north of Jerusalem, fleeing to Galilee and the Golan, further increasing the Jewish population in the region. During this time, Jews remained a minority of the population in the Golan. Despite nominally being under Agrippa's control and situated outside the province of Judaea, the Jewish communities in the area participated in the revolt. Initially, Gamla was loyal to Rome, but later the town switched allegiance and even minted its own revolt coins. Josephus, who was appointed by the provisional government in Jerusalem as commander of Galilee, fortified the cities of Sogana, Seleucia, and Gamla in the Golan. The Roman military, under Vespasian's command, eventually ended the northern revolt in 67 CE by capturing Gamla after a siege. Josephus reports that the people of Gamla opted for mass suicide, throwing themselves into a ravine. Today, the visible breach in the wall near the synagogue, along with remnants such as fortress walls, tower ruins, armor fragments, various projectiles, and fire damage, testify to the siege's intensity. Jews again sought refuge in the Golan after the suppression in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, which increased the Jewish population in the region significantly.
From 93 CE, the Paneas region forming the north of the Golan belonged to the province of Phoenice. Based on Ptolemy's Geography (c. 150 CE), the western portions of the Golan, including the regions of Hippos and Gaulanitis, were part of Syria Palaestina, the new province which replaced Judaea after Bar Kokhba's revolt. The eastern parts belong to the province of Arabia Petraea, established in 106 CE.
By the close of the second century, Judah ha-Nasi was granted a lease for 2,000 units of land in the Golan. An excavation at Hippos discovered a Roman road that connected the Sea of Galilee with the city of Nawa in Syria.
Late Roman and Byzantine periods[edit]
Church of Deir Qeruh
Reconstructed synagogue at Umm el-Qanatir
In the later Roman and Byzantine periods, the area was administered as part of Phoenicia Prima and Syria Palaestina, and finally Golan/Gaulanitis was included together with Peraea in Palaestina Secunda, after 218 CE. The area of the ancient kingdom of Bashan was incorporated into the province of Batanea.
The Golan preserves a notable group of Diocletianic boundary stones, which document village demarcations from the late third and early fourth centuries CE.
The political and economic recovery of Palestine during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries CE, led to a resurgence of Jewish life in the Golan. Excavations at various synagogue sites have uncovered ceramics and coins that provide evidence of this resettlement. During this period, several synagogues were constructed, and today 25 locations with ancient synagogues or their remnants have been discovered, all situated in the central Golan. These synagogues, built from the abundant basalt stones of the region, were influenced by those in the Galilee but exhibited their own distinctive characteristics; prominent examples include Umm el-Qanatir, Qatzrin and Deir Aziz. Some of the early Jerusalem Talmud tractates may have been arranged and edited during this period in Qatzrin. Several sites in the Golan show evidence of destruction from the Jewish revolt against Gallus in 351 CE. However, some of these sites were later rebuilt and continued to be inhabited in subsequent centuries.
In the 5th century CE, the Byzantine Empire assigned the Ghassanids, a Christian Arab tribe that had long settled in Syria, the task of protecting its eastern borders against the Sasanian-allied Arab tribe, the Lakhmids. The Ghassanids had emigrated from Yemen in the third century and actively supported Byzantium against Persia. They were initially nomadic but gradually became semi-sedentary, and adopted Christianity along with a number of Arab tribes situated in the borders of the Byzantine Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries. The Ghassanids had adopted Monophysitism in the 5th century. At the end of the 5th century, the primary Ghassanid encampments in the Golan were Jabiyah and Jawlan, situated in the eastern Golan beyond the Ruqqad. The Ghassanids settled deep inside the Byzantine limes, and in a Syriac source for July 519, they are attested as having their "opulent" headquarters in the eastern Gaulanitis. Like the Herodian dynasty before them, the Ghassanids ruled as a client state of Rome – this time, the Christianized Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantium. In 529, Emperor Justinian appointed al-Harith ibn Jabalah as Phylarch, making him the leader of all Arab tribes and bestowing upon him the title of Patricius, ranking just below the Emperor.
Arab Christians became the majority in the Golan with the arrival of the Ghassanids to the region. In 377 CE, a sanctuary for John the Baptist was established in the Golan village of Er-Ramthaniyye. The sanctuary was often visited by the Ghassanids.
In the 6th century, the Golan was inhabited by the well-established Jews and Ghassanid Christians. The Jewish population in the Golan engaged in agriculture, as evidenced by pre-Islamic Arab poet Muraqquish the Younger, who mentioned wine brought by Jewish traders from the region, and local synagogues may have been funded by the prosperous production of olive oil. A monastery and church dedicated to Saint George has been found in the Byzantine village of Deir Qeruh in the Golan, located near Gamla. The church has a square apse - a feature known from ancient Syria and Jordan, but not present in churches west of the Jordan River.
The Ghassanids were able to hold on to the Golan until the Sassanid invasion of 614. Following a brief restoration under the Emperor Heraclius, the Golan again fell, this time to the invading Muslim Arabs after the Battle of the Yarmuk in 636. Data from surveys and excavations combined show that the bulk of sites in the Golan were abandoned between the late 6th and early 7th century as a result of military incursions, the breakdown of law and order, and the economy brought on by the weakening of the Byzantine rule. Some settlements lasted till the end of the Umayyad era.
Early Muslim period[edit]
After the Battle of Yarmouk, Muawiyah I, a member of Muhammad's tribe, the Quraish, was appointed governor of Syria, including the Golan. Following the assassination of his cousin, the Caliph Uthman, Muawiya claimed the Caliphate for himself, initiating the Umayyad dynasty. Over the next few centuries, while remaining in Muslim hands, the Golan passed through many dynastic changes, falling first to the Abbasids, then to the Shi'ite Fatimids, then to the Seljuk Turks.
An earthquake in 746 devastated the Jewish village of Katzrin. Following it, there was a brief period of greatly diminished occupation during the Abbasid period (approximately 750–878). Jewish communities persisted at least into the Middle Ages in the towns of Fiq in the southern Golan and Nawa in Batanaea.
For many centuries nomadic tribes lived together with the sedentary population in the region. At times, the central government attempted to settle the nomads which would result in the establishment of permanent communities. When the power of the governing regime declined, as happened during the early Muslim period, nomadic trends increased and many of the rural agricultural villages were abandoned due to harassment from the Bedouins. They were not resettled until the second half of the 19th century.
Crusader/Ayyubid period[edit]
Nimrod Fortress, built by the Ayyubids and hugely enlarged by the Mamluks
During the Crusades, the Golan's elevated terrain posed a significant challenge to the Crusader armies, although the Crusader forces held the strategically important town of Banias twice, in 1128–32 and 1140–64. After victories by Sultan Nur ad-Din Zangi, it was the Kurdish dynasty of the Ayyubids under Sultan Saladin who ruled the area. The Mongols swept through in 1259, but were driven off by the Mamluk commander and future sultan Qutuz at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260.
The victory at Ain Jalut allowed the Mamluks to focus their attention to eliminating the last of the Crusader strongholds and ensured their dominance of the region for the next 250 years.
Ottoman period[edit]
Sykes–Picot Agreement map, signed 8 May 1916, showing the Golan Heights in area "A", an independent Arab state in the French sphere of influence
In the 16th century, the Ottoman Turks conquered Syria. During this time, the Golan formed part of the Hauran Sanjak. During the 1560s, Ottoman official Mustafa Lala Pasha established al-Qunaytira as an important regional center, building a caravanserai, a mosque and shops, and endowing them with properties in dozens of villages around the Golan.
Some Druze communities were established in the Golan during the 17th and 18th centuries. The villages were abandoned during previous periods due to raids by Bedouin tribes were not resettled until the second half of the 19th century.
Throughout the 18th century, the Al Fadl, an Arab tribe long established in the Levant, struggled against Turkmen and Kurdish tribesmen over control of the Golan. The Fadl's presence in the Golan was observed by Burckhardt in the early 19th century.
Transhumance in the Golan remained a long-lasting phenomenon because of the region's harsh winters. The winters "forced tribespeople until the 19th century to live in hundreds of rudimentary 'winter villages' in their tribal territory." Starting in the second part of the 19th century, the villages became "fixed and formed the nucleus of fully sedentary life in the 20th century Golan."
In 1868, the region was described as "almost entirely desolate". According to a travel handbook of the time, only 11 of 127 ancient towns and villages in the Golan were inhabited. By the late 19th century, the Golan Heights was mostly inhabited by Arabs, Turkmen and Circassians. The Circassians, part of a large influx of refugees from the Caucasus into the empire as a result of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, were encouraged to settle in the Golan by the Ottoman authorities. They were granted lands with a 12-year tax exemption. The Al Fadl, the Druze and the Circassians were often in conflict for local dominance. These struggles subsided with the Ottoman government's formal recognition of the Al Fadl's tribal territory and pasturelands in the Golan, which were invested in the name of the tribe's emir. The emir relocated to Damascus and collected rents from his tribesmen who thereafter settled in the area and engaged in a combination of farming and pastoralism. The tribe settled in several villages in the area and controlled important roads to Damascus, Galilee and Lebanon. In the 19th century the tribe continued to expand their territory in the Golan and built two palaces. The leader of the tribe joined Prince Faisal during the Arab revolt, and they supported the uprising against the French in the northern Golan.
In 1885, civil engineer and architect, Gottlieb Schumacher, conducted a survey of the entire Golan Heights on behalf of the German Society for the Exploration of the Holy Land, publishing his findings in a map and book entitled The Jaulân.
Modern Jewish settlement[edit]
In 1880, Laurence Oliphant published Eretz ha-Gilad (The Land of Gilead), which described a plan for large-scale Jewish settlement in the Golan. In 1884, there were still open stretches of uncultivated land between villages in the lower Golan, but by the mid-1890s most were owned and cultivated. Some land had been purchased in the Golan and Hawran by Zionist associations based in Romania, Bulgaria, the United States and England, in the late 19th century and early 20th century. In the winter of 1885, members of the Old Yishuv in Safed formed the Beit Yehuda Society and purchased 15,000 dunams (15 km2; 5.8 sq mi) of land from the village of Ramthaniye in the central Golan.
Soon afterwards, the society regrouped and purchased 2,000 dunams (2.0 km2; 0.77 sq mi) of land from the village of Bir e-Shagum on the western slopes of the Golan. The village they established, Bnei Yehuda, existed until 1920. The last families left in the wake of the Passover riots of 1920. In 1944, the Jewish National Fund bought the Bnei Yehuda lands from their Jewish owners, but a later attempt to establish Jewish ownership of the property in Bir e-Shagum through the courts was not successful.
Between 1891 and 1894, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild purchased around 150,000 dunams (150 km2; 58 sq mi) of land in the Golan and the Hawran for Jewish settlement. Legal and political permits were secured and ownership of the land was registered in late 1894. The Jews also built a road stretching from Lake Hula to Muzayrib. The Agudat Ahim society, whose headquarters were in Yekaterinoslav, Russia, acquired 100,000 dunams (100 km2; 39 sq mi) of land in several locations in the districts of Fiq and Daraa. A plant nursery was established and work began on farm buildings in Jillin. A village called Tiferet Binyamin was established on lands purchased from Saham al-Jawlan by the Shavei Zion Association based in New York, but the project was abandoned after a year when the Turks issued an edict in 1896 evicting the 17 non-Turkish families. A later attempt to resettle the site with Syrian Jews who were Ottoman citizens also failed.
Between 1904 and 1908, a group of Crimean Jews settled near the Arab village of al-Butayha in the Bethsaida Valley, initially as tenants of a Kurdish proprietor with the prospects of purchasing the land, but the arrangement faltered. Jewish settlement in the region dwindled over time, due to Arab hostility, Turkish bureaucracy, disease and economic difficulties. In 1921–1930, during the French Mandate, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA) obtained the deeds to the Rothschild estate and continued to manage it, collecting rents from the Arab peasants living there.
French and British mandates[edit]
Boundary changes in the area of the Golan Heights in the 20th century
Great Britain accepted a Mandate for Palestine at the meeting of the Allied Supreme Council at San Remo, but the borders of the territory were not defined at that stage. The boundary between the forthcoming British and French mandates was defined in broad terms by the Franco-British Boundary Agreement of December 1920. That agreement placed the bulk of the Golan Heights in the French sphere. The treaty also established a joint commission to settle the precise details of the border and mark it on the ground.
The commission submitted its final report on 3 February 1922, and it was approved with some caveats by the British and French governments on 7 March 1923, several months before Britain and France assumed their Mandatory responsibilities on 29 September 1923. In accordance with the same process, a nearby parcel of land that included the ancient site of Tel Dan and the Dan spring were transferred from Syria to Palestine early in 1924.
The Golan Heights, including the spring at Wazzani and the one at Banias, became part of French Syria, while the Sea of Galilee was placed entirely within British Mandatory Palestine. When the French Mandate for Syria ended in 1944, the Golan Heights became part of the newly independent state of Syria and was later incorporated into Quneitra Governorate.
Border incidents after 1948[edit]
A minefield warning sign in the Golan
After the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli War, the Golan Heights was partly demilitarized by the Israel-Syria Armistice Agreement. During the following years, the area along the border witnessed thousands of violent incidents; the armistice agreement was being violated by both sides. The underlying causes of the conflict were a disagreement over the legal status of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), cultivation of land within it and competition over water resources. Syria claimed that neither party had sovereignty over the DMZ.
Israel contended that the Armistice Agreement dealt solely with military concerns and that it had political and legal rights over the DMZ. Israel wanted to assert control up to the boundary established in the 1923 Paulet–Newcombe Agreement in order to claim the Hula swamp, gain exclusive rights to Lake Galilee and divert water from the Jordan for its National Water Carrier. During the 1950s, Syria registered two principal territorial accomplishments: it took over Al Hammah enclosure south of Lake Tiberias and established a de facto presence on and control of the eastern shore of the lake.
Israel expelled Arabs from the DMZ and demolished their homes. Palestinian refugees were denied the right of return or compensation, and because of this they started raids on Israel. The Syrian government supported the Palestinian attacks because of Israel taking over more land in the DMZ.
The Jordan Valley Unified Water Plan was sponsored by the United States and agreed by the technical experts of the Arab League and Israel. The U.S. funded the Israeli and Jordanian water diversion projects, when they pledged to abide by the plan's allocations. President Nasser too, assured the U.S. that the Arabs would not exceed the plan's water quotas. However, in the early 1960s the Arab League funded a Syrian water diversion project that would have denied Israel use of a major portion of its water allocation. The resulting armed clashes are called the War over Water.
In 1955, Israel launched an attack that killed 56 Syrian soldiers. The attack was condemned by the United Nations Security Council.
In July 1966, Fatah began raids into Israeli territory, with active support from Syria. At first the militants entered via Lebanon or Jordan, but those countries made concerted attempts to stop them and raids directly from Syria increased. Israel's response was a series of retaliatory raids, of which the largest were an attack on the Jordanian village of Samu in November 1966. In April 1967, after Syria heavily shelled Israeli villages from the Golan Heights, Israel shot down six Syrian MiG fighter planes and warned Syria against future attacks.
The Israelis used to send tractors with armed police into the DMZ, which prompted Syria firing at Israel. In the period between the first Arab–Israeli War and the Six-Day War, the Syrians constantly harassed Israeli border communities by firing artillery shells from their dominant positions on the Golan Heights. In October 1966 Israel brought the matter up before the United Nations. Five nations sponsored a resolution criticizing Syria for its actions but it failed to pass. No Israeli civilian was killed in half a year leading up to the Six-Day War and the Syrian attacks have been called "largely symbolic".
Former Israeli General Mattityahu Peled said that more than half of the border clashes before the 1967 war "were a result of our security policy of maximum settlement in the demilitarized area".[better source needed] Israeli incursions into the zone were responded to with Syrians shooting. Israel in turn would retaliate with military force. According to Finkelstein, the narrative of Syrians attacking "innocent" Israel from the Golan Heights can be construed as "historical revisionism".
In 1976, former Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan said Israel provoked more than 80% of the clashes with Syria in the run up to the 1967 war, although two Israeli historians debate whether he was "giving an accurate account of the situation in 1967 or whether his version of what happened was colored by his disgrace after the 1973 Middle East war, when he was forced to resign as Defense Minister over the failure to anticipate the Arab attack." The provocation was sending a tractor to plow in the demilitarized areas to get the Syrians to attack. The Syrians responded by firing at the tractors and shelling Israeli settlements. Jan Mühren, a former UN observer in the area at the time, told a Dutch current affairs programme that Israel "provoked most border incidents as part of its strategy to annex more land". UN officials blamed both Israel and Syria for destabilizing the borders.
Six-Day War and Israeli occupation[edit]
See also: Six-Day War and Israeli Military Governorate
After the Six-Day War broke out in June 1967, Syria began shelling towns in Israel's north, which was disregarded for the first few days of the war, until the Israel Defense Forces captured the Golan Heights on 9–10 June. The area that came under Israeli control as a result of the war consists of two geologically distinct areas: the Golan Heights proper, with a surface of 1,070 km2 (410 sq mi), and the slopes of the Mount Hermon range, with a surface of 100 km2 (39 sq mi). The new ceasefire line was named the Purple Line. In the Golan Heights’ battle, 115 Israelis were killed and 306 wounded. An estimated 2,500 Syrians were killed, with another 5,000 wounded.
Forced transfer and displacement. Syrian civilians, hands raised, before Israeli soldiers, leave their homes in the Golan Heights.
During the war, between 80,000 and 131,000 Syrians fled or were expelled from the Heights, and around 7,000 remained in the Israeli-occupied territory. Israeli sources and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants reported that much of the local population of 100,000 fled as a result of the war, whereas the Syrian government stated that a large proportion of it was expelled. Among those forced out was the Fadl tribe. Israel has disallowed former residents to return, citing security reasons. The remaining villages were Majdal Shams, Shayta (later destroyed), Ein Qiniyye, Mas'ade, Buq'ata and, outside the Golan proper, Ghajar.
Military police headquarters in Quneitra under Israeli occupation, 1969.
Israeli settlement in the Golan began soon after the war. Merom Golan was founded in July 1967, and by 1970, there were 12 settlements. Construction of Israeli settlements began in the remainder of the territory held by Israel, which was under military administration until 1981, when Israel passed the Golan Heights Law extending Israeli law and administration throughout the territory. On 19 June 1967, the Israeli cabinet voted to return the Golan to Syria in exchange for a peace agreement, although this was rejected after the Khartoum Resolution of 1 September 1967. In the 1970s, as part of the Allon Plan, Israeli politician Yigal Allon proposed that a Druze state be established in Syria's Quneitra Governorate, including the Israeli-held Golan Heights. Allon died in 1980 and his plan never materialised.
Yom Kippur War[edit]
During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Syrian forces overran much of the southern Golan, before being pushed back by an Israeli counterattack. Israel and Syria signed a ceasefire agreement in 1974 that left almost all the Heights in Israeli hands. The agreement delineated a demilitarized zone along the border and limited the number of forces each side can deploy within 25 kilometres (16 mi) of the zone. In the aftermath of the war and under the terms of United Nations Security Council Resolution 350, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force was assigned responsibility to oversee the demilitarized zone.
East of the 1974 ceasefire line, lies the Syrian controlled part of the Heights, an area covering 500 square kilometres (190 sq mi) that was not captured by Israel or 100 square kilometres (39 sq mi) that they had not withdrawn from. This area forms 30% of the Golan Heights. Today,[when?] it contains more than 40 Syrian towns and villages. In 1975, following the 1974 ceasefire agreement, Israel returned a narrow demilitarized zone to Syrian control. Some of the displaced residents started to return to their homes there, supported by the Syrian government’s rebuilding efforts, except for Quneitra. In the mid-1980s, the Syrian government launched "The Project for the Reconstruction of the Liberated Villages".[citation needed] By the end of 2007, the population of the Quneitra Governorate was estimated at 79,000.
Mines deployed by the Syrian army remain active. As of 2003[update], there had been at least 216 landmine casualties in the Syrian-controlled Golan since 1973, of which 108 were fatalities.
Annexation by Israel[edit]
See also: Golan Heights Law
Golan Heights wind farm on Mount Bnei Rasan
On 14 December 1981, Israel passed the Golan Heights Law, extending Israeli "laws, jurisdiction and administration" to the Golan Heights. Although the law effectively annexed the territory to Israel, it did not explicitly spell out a formal annexation. The Golan Heights Law was declared "null and void and without international legal effect" by United Nations Security Council Resolution 497, which also demanded that Israel rescind its decision.
During the negotiations regarding the text of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk explained that U.S. support for secure permanent frontiers did not mean the United States supported territorial changes. The UN representative for the United Kingdom, responsible for negotiating and drafting the Security Council resolution, said that the actions of the Israeli Government in establishing settlements and colonizing the Golan are in clear defiance of Resolution 242.
Syria continued to demand a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, including a strip of land on the east shore of the Sea of Galilee that Syria captured during the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli War and occupied from 1949 to 1967. Successive Israeli governments have considered an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan in return for normalization of relations with Syria, provided certain security concerns are met. Prior to 2000, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad rejected normalization with Israel.
Since the passing of the Golan Heights Law, Israel has treated the Israeli-occupied portion of the Golan Heights as a subdistrict of its Northern District. The largest locality in the region is the Druze village of Majdal Shams, which is at the foot of Mount Hermon, while Katzrin is the largest Israeli settlement. The region covers 1,176 square kilometres (454 sq mi). The subdistrict has a population density of 36 inhabitants per square kilometre (93/sq mi),[citation needed] and its population includes Arab, Jewish and Druze citizens. The district has 36 localities, of which 32 are Jewish settlements and four are Druze villages.
The plan for the creation of the settlements, which had initially begun in October 1967 with a request for a regional agricultural settlement plan for the Golan, was formally approved in 1971 and later revised in 1976. The plan called for the creation of 34 settlements by 1995, one of which would be an urban center, Katzrin, and the rest rural settlements, with a population of 54,000, among them 40,000 urban and the remaining rural. By 1992, 32 settlements had been created, among them one city and two regional centers. The population total had however fallen short of Israel's goals, with only 12,000 Jewish inhabitants in the Golan settlements in 1992.
Municipal elections in Druze towns[edit]
In 2016, a group of Druze lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court of Israel to allow elections for local councils in the Golan Druze towns of Majdal Shams, Buq'ata, Mas'ade, and Ein Qiniyye, replacing the previous system in which their members were appointed by the national government.
On 3 July 2017, the Interior Ministry announced those towns would be included in the 2018 Israeli municipal elections. The turnout was just over 1% with Druze religious leaders telling community members to boycott the elections or face shunning.
The UN Human Rights Council issued a Resolution on Human Rights in the Occupied Syrian Golan on 23 March 2018 that included the statement "Deploring the announcement by the Israeli occupying authorities in July 2017 that municipal elections would be held on 30 October 2018 in the four villages in the occupied Syrian Golan, which constitutes another violation to international humanitarian law and to relevant Security Council resolutions, in particular resolution 497 (1981)".
Israeli–Syrian peace negotiations[edit]
During United States-brokered negotiations in 1999–2000, Israel and Syria discussed a peace deal that would include Israeli withdrawal in return for a comprehensive peace structure, recognition and full normalization of relations. The disagreement in the final stages of the talks was on access to the Sea of Galilee. Israel offered to withdraw to the pre-1948 border (the 1923 Paulet-Newcombe line), while Syria insisted on the 1967 frontier. The former line has never been recognised by Syria, claiming it was imposed by the colonial powers, while the latter was rejected by Israel as the result of Syrian aggression.
While the difference between the lines is less than 100 metres (330 ft) for the most part, the 1967 line would give Syria access to the Sea of Galilee, and Israel wished to retain control of the Sea of Galilee, its only freshwater lake and a major water resource. Dennis Ross, U.S. President Bill Clinton's chief Middle East negotiator, blamed "cold feet" on the part of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for the breakdown. Clinton also laid blame on Israel, as he said after the fact in his autobiography My Life.
Israeli soldiers of the Alpinist Unit are dispatched to Mount Hermon.
In June 2007, it was reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had sent a secret message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad saying that Israel would concede the land in exchange for a comprehensive peace agreement and the severing of Syria's ties with Iran and militant groups in the region. On the same day, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the former Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, had promised to let Israel retain Mount Hermon in any future agreement.
In April 2008, Syrian media reported Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had told President Bashar al-Assad that Israel would withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for peace. Israeli leaders of communities in the Golan Heights held a special meeting and stated: "all construction and development projects in the Golan are going ahead as planned, propelled by the certainty that any attempt to harm Israeli sovereignty in the Golan will cause severe damage to state security and thus is doomed to fail". A 2008 survey found that 70% of Israelis oppose relinquishing the Golan for peace with Syria.
In 2008, a plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution 161–1 in favour of a motion on the Golan Heights that reaffirmed UN Security Council Resolution 497 and called on Israel to desist from "changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and legal status of the occupied Syrian Golan and, in particular, to desist from the establishment of settlements [and] from imposing Israeli citizenship and Israeli identity cards on the Syrian citizens in the occupied Syrian Golan and from its repressive measures against the population of the occupied Syrian Golan." Israel was the only nation to vote against the resolution. Indirect talks broke down after the Gaza War began. Syria broke off the talks to protest Israeli military operations. Israel subsequently appealed to Turkey to resume mediation.
In May 2009, Prime Minister Netanyahu said that returning the Golan Heights would turn it into "Iran's front lines which will threaten the whole state of Israel". He said: "I remember the Golan Heights without Katzrin, and suddenly we see a thriving city in the Land of Israel, which having been a gem of the Second Temple era has been revived anew." American diplomat Martin Indyk said that the 1999–2000 round of negotiations began during Netanyahu's first term (1996–1999), and he was not as hardline as he made out.
In March 2009, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad claimed that indirect talks had failed after Israel did not commit to full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. In August 2009, he said that the return of the entire Golan Heights was "non-negotiable", it would remain "fully Arab", and would be returned to Syria.
In June 2009, Israeli President Shimon Peres said that Assad would have to negotiate without preconditions, and that Syria would not win territorial concessions from Israel on a "silver platter" while it maintained ties with Iran and Hezbollah. In response, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem demanded that Israel unconditionally cede the Golan Heights "on a silver platter" without any preconditions, adding that "it is our land," and blamed Israel for failing to commit to peace. Syrian President Assad claimed that there was "no real partner in Israel".
In 2010, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said: "We must make Syria recognise that just as it relinquished its dream of a greater Syria that controls Lebanon ... it will have to relinquish its ultimate demand regarding the Golan Heights."
Syrian civil war[edit]
Further information: Israel and the Syrian civil war
2011 VOA report about how Golan Druze were affected by the Syrian civil war
From 2012 to 2018 in the Syrian civil war, the eastern Golan Heights became a scene of repeated battles between the Syrian Army, rebel factions of the Syrian opposition including the moderate Southern Front, the jihadist al-Nusra Front, and factions affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group.
The atrocities of the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIL, which from 2016 to 2018 controlled parts of the Syrian-administered Golan, added a new twist to the issue. In 2015, it was reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked US President Barack Obama to recognize Israeli claims to the territory because of these recent ISIL actions and because he said that modern Syria had likely "disintegrated" beyond the point of reunification. The White House dismissed Netanyahu's suggestion, stating that President Obama continued to support UN resolutions 242 and 497, and any alterations of this policy could strain American alliances with Western-backed Syrian rebel groups.
In 2016, the Islamic State apologized to Israel after a firefight with Israeli soldiers in the area.
After the April 2018 missile strikes against Syria by the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, a group of about 500 Druze in the Golan Heights town of Ein Qiniyye marched in support of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Syria's Independence Day and in condemnation of the American-led strikes.
In May 2018, after 20 Iranian rockets were launched at Israeli army positions in the western Golan Heights, the first direct attack by Iran against Israeli forces, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched Operation House of Cards, a series of "extensive" air strikes against Iranian military installations in Syria.
After waging a month-long 2018 Southern Syria offensive against the rebels and ISIL, the Syrian government regained control of the eastern Golan Heights on 31 July 2018.
Gaza war spillover[edit]
Further information: 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Israeli invasion of Syria (2024–present)
The day after the October 7 attacks, Hezbollah fired mortars at Northern Israel from Lebanese territory, and Israel responded with artillery fire. Hostilities are still ongoing. In the first year following the attacks, Hezbollah fired 8,000 rockets into Israel, resulting in the displacement of 70,000 Israelis. During the same period, Israeli reprisals resulted in the displacement of 1.4 million Lebanese people.
In June 2024, after a wave of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, Hezbollah launched a series of rocket and drone attacks in the Golan Heights, causing the destruction of 10,000 dunams (10 km2; 3.9 sq mi) of open areas by fire and damaging parts of the Yehudiya Forest Nature Reserve, including hiking trails and the reserve's Black Canyon. An official from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority said it would take years for the local flora to recover.
A rocket fired from Lebanese territory struck a soccer field in the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights on July 27, 2024. The strike resulted in the deaths of 12 Druze children. The IDF stated the rocket was fired by Hezbollah, a claim which Hezbollah denied. US intelligence could not determine if the attack was intentional or a misfire, but they maintained that Hezbollah was responsible. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, along with Iranian and Qatari state media, posited that an Israeli Iron Dome interceptor was to blame.
2024 Israeli invasion of Syria[edit]
Following the 2024 Syrian opposition offensives and the fall of the Assad regime, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered Israeli forces to seize the buffer zone on 8 December 2024, citing the abandonment of Syrian positions and the collapse of the 1974 ceasefire agreement. Israeli forces also launched strikes on Syrian military assets, including air strikes destroying the Syrian Navy and, it was claimed, 90% of Syria's known surface-to-air missiles.
Israel started violating the 1974 Disengagement Agreement before Assad's fall in November with engineering work and battle tanks inside the demilitarized zone. UNDOF had: "repeatedly engaged with the IDF to protest the construction" In December, Israeli forces occupied Mount Hermon advancing as far as the town of Beqaasem, situated about 25 kilometres (16 mi) from Damascus. Holding Mount Hermon - at 2,800 metres (9,200 ft) the highest point in Syria - would facilitate Israeli electronic surveillance deep in Syrian territory and provide additional warning with respect to military developments in the region.
A report from June 2025, showed that since the Israeli invasion of Syria in 2024, the Israelis have deforested large portions of the Quneitra governorate. Hundreds of acres of trees have been cut down by Israel including the Jabaatha Nature Reserve and Kudna forest have been destroyed. The deforestation threatens wildlife and biodiversity in the region. Syrian farmers have also been prohibited from entering their farmlands.
In January 2026, the Israeli military destroyed two historic buildings in the Golan, the al-Golan hospital and al-Andalus Cinema, both in Quneitra.
In January 2026, several reports documented Israeli planes spraying chemicals on Syrian farmland and forests in the Golan Heights. Israel spraying chemicals were also reported in southern Lebanon. A sample from Lebanon showed that the chemical contained a carcinogenic classified herbicide, but in dozens of times higher concentration than normal usage.
