عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Arab World

Israel Presses Washington to Recognize Golan Heights As Part of Its Territories

Israeli soldiers walk near mobile artillery units near the border with Syria in the Golan Heights on January 27, 2015. REUTERS/Baz Ratner
Israeli soldiers walk near mobile artillery units near the border with Syria in the Golan Heights on January 27, 2015. REUTERS/Baz Ratner
TT
20
TT

Israel Presses Washington to Recognize Golan Heights As Part of Its Territories

Israeli soldiers walk near mobile artillery units near the border with Syria in the Golan Heights on January 27, 2015. REUTERS/Baz Ratner
Israeli soldiers walk near mobile artillery units near the border with Syria in the Golan Heights on January 27, 2015. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

After the United States' recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the transfer of the US Embassy to it, Israel is pressing Washington to recognize the occupied Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israeli territories, Intelligence Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday.

In remarks to Israeli media, he said that Israel was making great efforts and was exerting friendly pressure on the administration of US President Donald Trump to recognize its sovereignty on the Golan Heights.

The Israeli minister predicted that these efforts would bear fruit with the approval of the US within months.

The Golan Heights is a strategic area in Syria, occupied since the June 1967 war. It extends over 1,200 square kilometers, giving the occupation the ability to explore large areas of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

The Syrian army was able to liberate it completely in the early days of the 1973 war, but withdrew from it in the last days of the war. Based on the Disengagement Agreement in 1974, Israel withdrew from part of it. In 1981, Israel enacted a law in the Knesset to annex it to Israeli sovereignty, in a move not recognized internationally.

Katz stressed that the new move was a natural extension of the US withdrawal from the international nuclear agreement with Iran, Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the opening of a new US embassy in the occupied city this month.

He noted that the Israeli presence in the Golan Heights was a security necessity for Israel and its allies, an important monitoring station for the West over the domestic and international activity in Syria and a lever for Western interests in the region.

Most Viewed

 
Arab World

Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
TT
20
TT

Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.