As Damascus Hangs Back, Syrians Have Been Left to Fend Off Israeli Occupation on Their OwnThe resistance in southwestern Syria to occupying Israeli troops is localized and spontaneous, but fierce. And the government in Damascus has done little to help them on the ground.
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NAWA, Syria—”The Israelis passed through five other villages to get to us,” Abdullah Al-Saqr said. The septuagenarian was sitting on an embroidered cushion in a darkened room surrounded by other men from Nawa, a small town in southwestern Syria with houses built of concrete and basalt—the signature black volcanic rock pulled from the earth of Daraa province. Al-Saqr recounted in detail what happened on April 3, 2025, when the Israeli military that has come to occupy a large swathe of southwestern Syria over the past two years, conducted a violent raid on Nawa. That night, the local residents fought back. Israeli troops reached the village of Jubaylia, six kilometers (3.7 miles) away, before guards hired to look after vacant farmland spotted the advance and called in young men from Nawa. “Everyone was armed,” Al-Saqr said. “They went out with hunting rifles, army rifles—whatever weapons they had—to stop the Israeli advance.” The first groups raced to the location on motorbikes and engaged the soldiers with small arms. The Israelis called in reinforcements, and the young men of Nawa did the same, calling on their cousins and neighbors; the battle grew as more people arrived in waves. Israeli drones and helicopter gunships struck overhead, targeting locals on the ground. A contingent of Israeli troops hid themselves in a position behind the locals and first responders arriving at the scene, “effectively setting a trap” for those arriving to help the wounded, Al-Saqr said. Israeli artillery positioned in the far distance targeted the road leading to the battle. In all, nine men from Nawa were killed and 12 wounded. Despite the losses, they managed to turn back the advancing Israeli troops. The battle was just one of several incidents over the past 18 months when local residents in towns and villages across southwestern Syria fought back against occupying Israeli forces. In that time, resistance to Israeli occupation in Syria has stayed largely local and spontaneous—young men grabbing arms and confronting soldiers during raids in places like Nawa, Kuwayya, and Beit Jinn—with no formal command structure and no government support. Yet it has produced a real deterrent: in every town that saw armed firefights, Israeli troops have reportedly not returned as of August 2026. Acts of unarmed resistance have been growing as well, with outraged families and residents launching impromptu street demonstrations to protest the Israeli military. Expanding Israeli OccupationSyria’s entire political and security landscape was transformed on December 8, 2024 when, after nearly 14 years of revolution and war, a lightning offensive led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, swept into Damascus and toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government. Within hours, Israeli troops crossed from the occupied Golan Heights into a UN-patrolled buffer zone and later advanced farther into southwestern Syria. Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes launched hundreds of strikes on Syrian bases, airfields, naval vessels, weapons depots, missiles and air-defense systems, decimating Syria’s military capability. At first, Israel said the ground deployment was a temporary defensive measure and claimed the bombing was intended to prevent strategic weapons from reaching HTS or other groups it considered hostile. It subsequently abandoned any pretense of a limited military presence on the ground, with Defense Minister Israel Katz declaring that Israeli forces would remain on Syrian Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Shaykh) indefinitely and later reaffirming the military would remain in Syria for an “unlimited amount of time.” The Syrian government has repeatedly demanded the “immediate and unconditional withdrawal” of Israeli forces to the lines held before December 8, 2024, though it has done little more than issue statements. In southwestern Syria’s Quneitra, Dara’a, and Rif Dimashq (Damascus Countryside) provinces, which abut the UN-patrolled buffer zone, Israeli incursions are almost daily, with night patrols, house raids, checkpoints, and drone flights overhead. To the north of Nawa, lies the Circassian village of Breiga, whose land spreads out over scenic hills inside the UN buffer zone. Just outside of the village, two locals on a motorcycle warned Drop Site about IDF checkpoints ahead. “Never turn around if you spot one. Just stay calm, or you’ll be followed,” the local men said. Under what the Israeli military calls the “New East” project, troops are digging a continuous barrier of earthen walls and trenches four meters deep and four meters wide that passes less than a mile from Breiga. The barrier stretches from the northern Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, down to the southern border tripoint between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Jordan, and Syria, with increased surveillance over the entire area. Hamza Ghadban, the head of Syria’s Sijil Center, has tracked nine Israeli military bases established from Mount Hermon on the Syria-Lebanon border in the north to the Yarmouk River in the southern border with Jordan since the fall of the Assad regime. The new bases have come alongside the detention of at least 240 Syrian citizens, 46 of them still in Israeli custody as of August 2026. Thirty-six Syrians have been killed by the Israeli military in southwestern Syria, most of them during ground incursions: 13 in Beit Jinn, nine in Nawa, and seven in Kuwayya. In a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa accused Israel of violating Syria’s sovereignty and called for Israeli troops to withdraw from Syrian territory to the lines set under a 1974 disengagement agreement. Al-Sharaa said since December 2024, Israel had carried out nearly 500 air and artillery strikes, conducted more than 1,200 incursions into Syria, and detained around 300 people. “We reject the permanent Israeli attempts to impose a fait accompli in Syria,” Al-Sharaa said, referring to the Israeli occupation of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights and beyond. However, residents in southwestern Syria confronting Israeli forces on the ground say the government in Damascus has done little to come to their aid. Localized ResistanceBack in Nawa, Muhammad Khair Al-Batal said that the Israeli helicopter gunships arrived after the initial skirmishes began that night in April. “Half an hour later, we saw five or six [Israeli] helicopters arrive. As soon as they located someone, they struck him.”
Among the casualties were two brothers from the Batha family: “Hashim was killed and Abdullah was wounded,” Al-Saqr said. “A missile landed in front of Muhammad al-Rifai and killed him.” “We believed the small drones were filming us and transmitting our coordinates to the helicopters so they could strike,” he added. “The missiles were fired from a safe distance from their soldiers so that they would not be harmed.” Choking back his tears, Abdullah al-Saqr pointed to photos on a battered smartphone: the corpses of young men killed in the clash that night, one of them his son. “His name was Issa al-Saqr,” he said, his eyes red and voice cracking. “He was married and had four children.” By all accounts, the resistance was spontaneous rather than planned. “Everything happened suddenly,” Muhammad al-Saqr said. “We never expected them to enter in the first place.” Residents also suspected that Israel had manipulated the local telecommunications network. “At first, phone coverage was unusually strong—in this area, it is normally weak,” he said. “They strengthened the network, and then they began striking us,” he said, adding that he believed the Israelis strengthened mobile coverage to allow for better communication and precise targeting through the network signal. No support arrived from the government in Damascus. “We asked the new government for help, but no help came,” said Jihad Tayasni, a local resident in Nawa. He said requests for military support and emergency rescue workers went unanswered. “They did not even allow an ambulance to reach us. Civilian cars were the ones that went in and evacuated the wounded.” Outmanned and outgunned, the local residents of Nawa suffered losses but they did manage to prevent the advancing Israeli troops from entering the town or occupying Tal Al-Jumoua, a strategic Assad-era military position atop a nearby mountain. Israeli forces have occupied hilltops throughout southwestern Syria where they have built or reinforced military bases with sweeping views over the region. However, these acts of localized resistance seem to have acted as a deterrent. The Israeli military used to enter that stretch of the mountain on an almost daily basis, according to residents. “Since the battle,” al-Saqr said, “it has not returned.” The same can be said about the village of Kuwayya, which lies some 16 miles to the south of Nawa and overlooks the Yarmouk River, which forms part of Syria’s border with Jordan. Last year, Israeli ground troops advanced on the town only to be met with bullets “It was the first and last intervention,” said Hamada Msallam, a farmer who only offered a pseudonym out of fear of reprisals. He spoke to Drop Site from his home perched on a hill above the river. On March 25, 2025, he found Israeli soldiers spread through the fields as he walked to his agricultural land below the village. When he and other farmers refused to let them into the village, the soldiers fired warning shots. “Men from the village grabbed weapons from their homes and went and stood against the Israelis,” Msallam said. “It wasn’t small arms against small arms. The moment we fired, they struck us with explosives.” According to Msallam, the Israelis sent surveillance drones over the village and later sent armed drones which fired missiles. In the battle, local resistance won out, and the Israelis withdrew, leaving six local men dead. He said that after the battle, the Israeli forces never came back. When asked why resistance broke out in Kuwayya and not other villages facing the same patrols, Msallam only said it was a spontaneous act in the moment. “If the Israelis had come in on a different road, or caught us off guard, perhaps there would have been no resistance, or no blood spilled,” he said. “But there was fire in all the men’s hearts in the village.” Msallam had heard rumors of soldiers in other villages dragging residents–including women–out of their homes at night. “I, my brother, my son, will die fighting before they ever enter our homes and touch our women,” he said. “Our home is our dignity.” Other forms of quieter resistance have sprung up in nearby communities, with neighboring villages piling stones and earth to build barriers across roads in order to block Israeli patrols. On June 28, 2026, residents of Abdeen, a village just two and a half miles to the north of Kuwayya, hurled stones at an Israeli patrol that answered with warning shots and artillery fire, prompting most of the village to flee the area. During one such confrontation near Abdeen, an Israeli soldier dropped a military-issue phone that ended up in a local’s hands, marked “Olar”—the Israeli military’s name for Orion, a battlefield-mapping and terrain-analysis system. At the Al-Jazeera base, an old Assad-era military barracks taken over by the Israelis, Israeli forces have demanded that residents of nearby Kuwayya hand over their weapons, and conducted routine searches of their homes. “People here genuinely believe they are left to their own fate,” one farmer said. The newly occupied bases have become launching points for Israeli patrols and military operations against locals. On August 24, an Israeli patrol launched a raid from Al-Jazeera base with ground troops and vehicles backed by drones into Ma’ariya, a village just over a mile west of Kuwayya. Beit Jinn, an isolated farming community 40 miles to the north of Kuwayya, in the mountains near the Israel-Lebanon-Syria border nestled among water channels and tree cover, has been subject to multiple Israeli incursions over the years. On June 12, 2025, Israeli troops entered the village and abducted several young men from their homes. “We were at home, sleeping. At 3 a.m. they came, terrorizing the boys and women,” said Fatima Mohamed Safadi, a local resident. “They let their dogs into the house and then entered themselves. They pulled young men out of their homes, beat them up, and took them in their cars,” she said, sitting at a plastic table in the shade of Beit Jinn’s trees. Two of Safadi’s sons were taken in the raid. She said one of them had been a fighter in the Free Syrian Army years before. The Israeli military branded both of them as terrorists. For seven months she didn’t know if they were alive, until she saw a YouTube video of a fellow prisoner in Israel naming the men held alongside him. “That is how we found them,” she said.
“No one fought back” that night, she said. “We lived next to them like neighbors. When they came in before, they never talked to us.” During the civil war, factions from Beit Jinn even received military support from Israel in their battle against the Assad government. Residents believed that history would protect them. June 12, 2025 changed that. Israeli forces killed a local resident, Mohammed Hamada, and arrested seven others, including Safadi’s sons. Locals blamed informants for giving up their names. Safaa Safadi, a computer engineer and activist from the village, said the detainees were transferred to Israel and accused of belonging to Hamas, an allegation their families deny. When the next Israeli raid came in late November, some in the village decided to resist. The response was fierce but unorganized. Villagers rained bullets on the Israeli military unit from the streets and homes of Beit Jinn. During the firefight, “My neighbors told me that a local fighter was knocking on doors asking for ammunition,” Safaa said. “But neighbors were too afraid to assist him for fear that they would be the next target. The situation was chaotic and no one knew what was happening. People chose to stay out of it.” “The guys resisting shot at an Israeli Humvee,” said Mohammed Abderrazzaq Al-Saadi, the mokhtar, or community leader, of Beit Jinn. “One of [the fighters firing at the Humvee] was Hassan, my son, a martyr. It was supposed to be his wedding day,” Al-Saadi said somberly. Israeli soldiers abandoned the Humvee. “When they could not retrieve it, they targeted it from the air with two missiles,” Al-Saadi said. Israel called in air support: warplanes, artillery, tank fire, drones, and helicopters through the night, while ambulances were kept out for hours. “The shelling began by all possible means—from warplanes, to artillery shelling from Jabal al-Sheikh [Mount Hermon], to direct tank shelling on every location,” Safaa said. Thirteen people were killed and as many as 35 wounded—five from the Hamada family alone, including four-year-old Shahad. The Israeli military later said six Israeli soldiers were wounded in the operation. The attack forced nearly all the 2,500 residents of the village to flee. Only a handful have been able to return. “We did not initiate any attack on them, not even a stone, we were shocked that they were attacking us,” Safaa said. “We are the same people, before and after the fall of Assad... why would they change their intentions towards us? We live in fear of a repetition of what happened.” Since the raids, residents have made repeated trips to Damascus to demand that the government press for their relatives’ release, including holding a street protest in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on April 26, 2025. The ministry said it “condemns in the strongest possible terms the criminal attack perpetrated by a patrol of the Israeli occupation forces that infiltrated the town of Beit Jinn,” describing the subsequent deliberate bombardment of civilian homes as “a fully fledged war crime,” and held Israel “fully responsible for this grave aggression.” The government only told residents that negotiations are ongoing and that family members should wait for the results. The Proclamations of Uli Al-Ba’asThere have been claims of more organized resistance to the Israeli occupation of southwestern Syria, though the veracity of those claims remains dubious. An Iran-linked group calling itself Uli al-Ba’as—Possessors of Might, formally the Islamic Resistance Front in Syria—has claimed credit on the internet for several clashes with Israeli forces, mostly in southwestern Syria. The group announced itself in January 2025 under a different name, Jabhat Tahrir al-Janoub, the “South Liberation Front,” which appeared on paper leaflets circulated across the Syrian south before it rebranded as Uli al-Ba’as. In a written statement sent to Drop Site on Telegram, the Uli al-Ba’as media office described the group as taking pride in belonging to “the Axis of Resistance extending from Tehran to Beirut and Palestine,” drawing on inspiration from “the experiences of Hezbollah and Hamas” and their “history full of victories and jihad against Zionism.” The statement said Uli al-Ba’as operates as “an inseparable part of the joint operations rooms of the cross-border Axis of Resistance,” exchanging intelligence and logistics with allies like Hezbollah. The statement claims rocket strikes on Israeli positions at Tal al-Ahmar and the Al-Jazeera base, among others. It also claimed a parallel campaign against Syria’s own transitional government, whose security services it brands as “tools of the Zionist enemy.” Uli al-Ba’as special security groups, the statement says, have carried out “a series of silent strikes and hit-and-run attacks” against government security offices in Dara’a and Rif Dimashq, ranging from assassinating officers to foiling attempts to locate its rocket batteries. However, researchers who track the group remain skeptical that its rhetoric matches its actions on the ground. Analyst Wail Olwan from Jusoor Research Center said Uli al-Ba’as messaging consistently outpaces independently verifiable attacks. Syria-based researcher Aymenn al-Tamimi notes the group is itself split into two rival factions that accuse each other of being infiltrated, and that one faction’s claim that two of its fighters died fighting in Abdeen appears to be fabricated, as he found no evidence either man died there at all. In contrast to the proclamations of Uli al-Ba’as, what resistance there is in Syria appears to be ad hoc, organic, and reactive.
On December 9, 2025, an Israeli patrol of seven vehicles set up an unexpected checkpoint inside Khan Arnabeh–the main market and administrative town in Quneitra province, hugging the UN buffer zone. It was the first time Israeli forces had established a direct presence in the town. Villagers gathered to confront them. When an officer shouted in Arabic demanding they fall back, the mukhtar approached the Israelis while the crowd held its ground through a volley of warning shots. “This is my land. When you’re the owner of the land, you don’t need someone to encourage you to resist,” Mohammad Debbek, a young Syrian from Khan Arnabeh, said, wearing an AK-47 pendant around his neck as he spoke. During the confrontation, villagers threw rocks to force the patrol out. As troops opened fire, a round struck the back of Debbek’s leg. Months later, he walks with crutches and is still receiving treatment. The standoff in Khan Arnabeh was an early example of unarmed civilian pushback. By April 2026, that localized defiance had grown into organized demonstrations across Quneitra, coordinated over Facebook and WhatsApp. 24-year-old organizer Ilaf Obeid, of the group Syrians for Palestine, helped drive a motorcycle rally near the neighboring village of Al-Rafeed and a flag-burning at Khan Arnabeh’s roundabout to protest the Israeli presence. For Obeid, non-violent action is both principled and necessary. “Syria cannot bear armed conflict right now,” she said. “But when [the Israelis] see resistance, they think twice about advancing.” Patrols, she said, have visibly backed off wherever demonstrations took place. This reporting was supported in part by funding from the Overseas Press Club Foundation.
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