Mount Hermon is seen in the background as Israeli soldiers travel on mobile artillery units after an exercise in the Golan Heights, February 2013. (photo credit: BAZ RATNER/REUTERS)
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The Israeli military and police are bracing for possible violent protests on both sides of the border on the Golan Heights with Syria after US President Donald Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the area.
“The IDF and Israel police are preparing for the possibility of tension in the northern Golan Heights on both sides of the border,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday without expanding.
According to Israeli media the military has deployed riot control equipment such as tear gas and rubber bullets as well as snipers to the northern Golan Heights.
Israel captured the Golan Heights, some 1,200 square kilometers, from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981. Under the 1974 ceasefire accord signed following the Yom Kippur War the previous year established a buffer zone between the two enemy countries. It was patrolled by UN troops until peacekeepers were abducted by Syrian rebels 2014.
Syrian troops recaptured southern Syria seven years after losing the area to rebel groups and returned to its positions along with Hezbollah operatives. Both UN Peacekeepers and Russian military police have been deployed along the Golan Heights border.
On Thursday Trump tweeted that “After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!”
His tweet, which according to McClatchy surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials, upended years of US policy.
“We all found out by tweet,” an Israeli official was quoted as saying. “We’ve been lobbying for this for a long time, but it was not the product of one phone call. There were hints, but we weren’t given advance notice.”
Syria slammed Trump’s move, calling it “irresponsible” and that it “confirms “the blind bias of the United States to the Zionist entity.”
Syria’s state news agency SANA quoted a senior foreign ministry source as saying that Syria would recover the Golan Heights “through all available means” and that Trump’s move wouldn’t change “the fact that the Golan was and will remain Arab and Syrian.”
While approximately half of the Golan’s residents are Jewish Israelis, a large part are Druze, many of whom are Syrian citizens.
In a statement published Friday by SANA, Druze were quoted as saying that Trump’s statements on the Golan is because of “the current political scene which is due to the steadfastness of the resistance axis and the failure of the hostile project against Syria.”
“The Syrian Arab people in Golan, as they in the past stood in the face of the French occupation, they will continue today to adhere to their national stance undermining many of the occupation’s projects, on top the annexation project, and they adhere to the will which hasn’t been defeated,” the statement added.
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