Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that increased Jewish settlement will cause the territory to “blossom”
The Israeli government has approved a plan to double the Jewish population of the illegally occupied Golan Heights. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that settling the region is vital for Israel’s security.
The decision to expand Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights was made “in light of the war and the new front facing Syria,” Netanyahu’s office said on Sunday.
”Strengthening the Golan is strengthening the state of Israel, and it is especially important at this time. We will continue to hold onto it, cause it to blossom, and settle in it,” read a statement from the Israeli head of government.
Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria’s Quneitra Province during the 1967 Six-Day War, and unilaterally annexed the territory in 1981. West Jerusalem’s claim to the region is considered invalid by every other country in the world except the US. Roughly 20,000 Jewish settlers live in the Golan Heights, and the region is also home to around the same number of Syrian Druze. The 30 or so Jewish settlements in the area are considered illegal under international law.
From the 1970s until earlier this month, Israeli forces in the Golan Heights were separated from their Syrian counterparts by a buffer zone on the Israeli side of the frontier. After Bashar Assad’s government in Damascus fell earlier this month, Israel sent troops into the buffer zone and beyond, in a move that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said is intended to create a new “security area” that would be clear of “heavy strategic weapons and terrorist infrastructure.”
Amid harsh criticism from the UN and its Arab neighbors, Katz said on Friday that he had instructed Israeli forces to remain on the eastern side of Mount Hermon – which straddles the border between the Golan Heights and the rest of Syria – during the winter. Katz defended the occupation of foreign territory, claiming that holding the mountain is of “enormous security importance” to Israel.
While the fall of Assad fulfilled a long-standing Israeli strategic objective, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have moved quickly to ensure that the country’s new government – led by the Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) jihadist group – cannot make use of Assad’s weapons. The IDF has carried out hundreds of airstrikes against Syrian ports, airfields, and arms depots over the past week, destroying billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment.
Netanyahu’s office has said that the collapse of Assad’s government “created a vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone.”
“Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities on the Golan Heights,” the prime minister’s office stated.
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