Syrian FM: Israel Launched Over 1,000 Attacks in Under Two Years

Damascus, MINA – Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said Saturday that Israel had carried out more than 1,000 attacks on his country in less than two years, killing dozens of people, Anadolu Agency reported.

Shaibani’s remarks came during a session on regional security at the Manama Dialogue 2026, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency.

“Our territory has been subjected to more than 1,000 Israeli attacks in less than two years, killing dozens,” Shaibani said. “How can calls for border control and placing weapons exclusively under state control be justified while Syrian sovereignty is violated and targeted on a daily basis?”

Expressing Damascus’s condemnation of the Israeli attacks, Shaibani called for a return to the lines in place before December 8, 2024, and for the implementation of the 1974 Disengagement Agreement.

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He stressed that the Golan Heights is Syrian territory and that UN Security Council Resolution 497 serves as the reference on this matter.

Since the fall of the Assad regime in Syria on December 8, 2024, Israel has occupied the Syrian buffer zone established under the 1974 Disengagement Agreement and set up military positions inside and outside it, a move the UN described as a violation of the agreement.

The 1974 agreement, brokered by the US after the October 1973 war, established a demilitarized buffer zone on the Golan Heights monitored by UN peacekeepers. Israel’s seizure of the zone following Assad’s fall upended that arrangement, and Israeli forces have since conducted repeated incursions, airstrikes, and ground operations inside Syrian territory, including raids and demolitions in the south.

Resolution 497, adopted unanimously by the Security Council in 1981, declared Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights null and void under international law and demanded that Israel rescind its decision. The Golan remains widely recognized as occupied Syrian territory.

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Shaibani’s intervention at the Manama Dialogue places the Syria file squarely within the broader regional security conversation, at a moment when Israel is simultaneously conducting military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, and the occupied West Bank. His framing links the demand for Syrian state control over weapons and borders to the prior condition of Israeli withdrawal, arguing that sovereignty cannot be restored while strikes continue on a daily basis.