The Israeli prime minister has been condemned throughout the Arab world for sending troops right into a demilitarized a part of the Golan Heights
The illegally occupied Golan Heights will “endlessly be an inseparable half” of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Monday. Sooner or later earlier, the Israeli prime minister ordered troops to advance right into a buffer zone separating the area from Syria.
At a press convention on Monday evening, Netanyahu declared that “right now, everybody understands the nice significance of our presence there on the Golan, and never on the foothills of the Golan,” a reference to Israel’s seizure of the territory from Syria through the 1967 Six-Day Conflict.
“The Golan Heights will endlessly be an inseparable a part of the state of Israel,” he added.
Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, a declare thought-about unlawful by all the world besides the US. Till Sunday, nonetheless, Israeli troops weren’t stationed alongside the border of the Golan Heights and Syria, because of a 1974 settlement below which the Israeli and Syrian governments agreed to determine a buffer zone on the Israeli facet of the frontier the place solely UN peacekeepers might deploy.
Israel despatched tanks and troops into this buffer zone on Sunday after opposition forces seized Damascus and Syria’s deposed president, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Russia in search of asylum. In a video assertion from the area, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the 1974 settlement establishing the demilitarized strip had successfully “collapsed” as soon as Syrian troops “deserted their positions.”
Israeli forces moved past the buffer zone and into Syria correct on Monday, in an operation that Israeli Protection Minister Israel Katz stated is meant to create a brand new “safety space” that will be away from “heavy strategic weapons and terrorist infrastructure.” Among the many websites captured by Israeli forces was the Syrian facet of Mount Hermon, the place one of many opening battles of the 1973 Yom Kippur Conflict was fought.
Round 20,000 Jewish settlers dwell within the Golan Heights, whereas the area can be house to across the identical variety of Syrian Druze. The 30 or so Jewish settlements within the space are thought-about unlawful below worldwide regulation.
Netanyahu described Israel’s advance into the buffer zone as “short-term.” Nevertheless, a number of neighboring nations have accused Israel of profiting from the ability vacuum in Damascus to orchestrate an unlawful land seize.
In an announcement on Monday, Qatar’s International Ministry referred to as the transfer “a harmful growth and a blatant assault on Syria’s sovereignty and unity, in addition to a flagrant violation of worldwide regulation.” Egypt accused Israel of exploiting the autumn of Assad “with a purpose to occupy extra Syrian land and to impose a brand new actuality on the bottom in contravention of worldwide regulation.”
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