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Israeli and Syrian officials held face-to-face meetings aimed at calming tensions and preventing conflict in the border region, Reuters reported on May 27, citing five people familiar with the matter.
Following the fall of the Assad regime last December, Israel invaded the buffer zone adjacent to the Golan Heights. It also launched hundreds of strikes against Syria, destroying nearly all of the country’s military capabilities.
Tensions between the two sides grew again earlier this month as Israel launched a series of strikes on Syria, including one that hit the vicinity of the presidential palace in Damascus. The strikes were a message to President Ahmad al-Sharaa in response to threats by the government against the Druze religious minority. Israel had vowed to protect Syrian Druze, citing historic ties with its own Druze community.
Amid this escalation Israel and Syria initiated talks, although previous reports said that the officials from the two countries were meeting in the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan. The new report from Reuters suggests that serious progress has been made.
Two Syrian and two Western sources, as well as a regional intelligence source told the news that the two countries had built a back channel.
On the Syrian side, the sources said that contacts have been led by senior security official Ahmad al-Dalati, who was appointed governor of the province of Quneitra, which borders the Golan Heights, after the fall of Assad. Earlier this week, Dalati was also put in charge of security in the southern governorate of al-Suwayda, home to Syria’s Druze minority.
Three of the sources revealed there had been several rounds of face-on-face meetings in the border region, including in territory controlled by Israel.
Al-Dalati, however, denied Reuters’ report, telling the Syrian state-run news channel, Al-Ikhbariya, that everything the news agency said was baseless.
The security official stressed that Syria’s position is “firm and clear” regarding talks with Israel, noting that the government was taking measures to “protect the Syrian people and defend Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, using legitimate means.”
It’s worth noting that United States President Donald Trump asked Sharaa during a meeting in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, earlier this month to make peace with Israel. Ahead of the meeting, Trump promised to leave all sanctions off the war-torn country to give it a chance to recover.
Recent reports also revealed that Syria made gestures of goodwill towards Israel, that included handing over the archive of an Israeli spy executed in Syria more than 60 years ago and the remains of a soldier killed in a battle in Lebanon in the 1980s.
All in all, a serious relationship appears to be formulating between Israel and Syria. However, this does not mean that a peace agreement is near. Israel is looking to maintain control over Golan and may even annex the buffer zone and other areas. On the other side, Sharaa appears to have no other option but to engage in the talks.
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