Syria says it will ‘use all legally available means to retake’ Golan

Israel captured the Golan Heights in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed the territory.

By Associated Press and World Israel News Staff

Syria said Monday that Israel’s plans to double the number of Israeli citizens living in Israeli-annexed Golan Heights mark a “dangerous and unprecedented” escalation between the countries.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced on Sunday a multimillion-dollar plan meant to double the number of Israelis living in the region that Israel captured from Syria more than five decades ago, as well as develop some 7,300 additional housing units in the area.

The U.S. recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan in 2019.

“Syria strongly condemns the dangerous and unprecedented escalation from the Israeli occupation forces in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and its persistence in settlement policies and grave and methodological violations that rise to the level of war crimes,” a Syrian Foreign Ministry statement said.

The Syrian state-run SANA news agency noted that Damascus would seek to use all legally available means to retake the territory.

The Foreign Ministry added that the Syrian government remains committed to the Syrians living in the Golan “who are steadfast in their resistance to the Israeli occupation and their rejection of the decision to annex the Golan.”

Entrenching Israeli control over the territory would complicate any future attempt to forge peace with Syria.

Bennett made his announcement during a special Cabinet meeting in the Golan Heights. His office said the government would invest some 1 billion shekels (over $300 million) into developing the Golan, including the establishment of two new towns.

Israel captured the Golan Heights in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed the territory. Bennett said Syria’s decade-long war made the idea of Israeli control of the territory more acceptable to its international allies, adding that the alternative would be much worse.

Some 50,000 people live in the Golan Heights — roughly half of them Jewish Israelis and half in Druze Arab villages that formerly were part of Syria.