هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
Hours after Israeli activists spent the night inside the buffer zone in southern Syria and tried to prepare a site for a settlement outpost, Israeli occupation forces intervened to evacuate them.
This was not the first such attempt. Rather, it was the latest episode in a series of moves led by an Israeli settler movement calling itself the “Bashan Pioneers,” which since late 2025 has been working to exploit Israel’s military presence in southern Syria and gradually turn it into a permanent settler presence through a mix of activity on the ground and political pressure.
From religious rhetoric to a settlement project
According to the movement’s own rhetoric, it is working toward a return to the historic region of “Bashan,” the biblical name for the broad area stretching from southwestern Syria to parts of Sweida province and extending beyond Syria’s borders into northern Jordan.
In its current discourse, the movement focuses on the Syrian areas seized by Israeli occupation forces during military operations in the south in 2025, in the period following the fall of the Assad regime, and seeks to establish settlement outposts there.
The movement includes settlers from settlements in the occupied Golan Heights and the West Bank, and it raises the “Bashan region emblem,” drawing on biblical texts about the “Bashan” region, a name that originally means fertile land, according to a special investigation by Sijil Center, a Syrian organization that monitors Israeli operations in Syria.
The movement is led by Israeli academic at Ariel University Amos Azaria, one of its most prominent figures and among the first settlers to take part in the initial incursions into Syrian territory. Alongside him is Jonathan Levy, the movement’s field coordinator and one of its chief ideologues.
The movement’s third most prominent figure is Yosef Luria, one of its spokesmen, who also calls on Israeli authorities to facilitate settlement in southern Syria.
To trace the course of the movement’s activities, NoonPost reviewed its posts on its official Facebook page, documenting the evolution of its field activity and political rhetoric, from calls and conferences to border crossings and overnight stays inside the buffer zone, all the way to attempts to establish settlement points and pressure for a permanent settler presence in the area.
First attempts at implementation
A review of the movement’s posts shows that the settlement project was present in its rhetoric from the first months after its founding. Since November 2025, the movement has been speaking of the need to establish settlements in southern Syria, arguing that Israel’s military presence would not be enough to guarantee control over the area unless it was transformed into a permanent “civilian” presence.
On Nov. 27, 2025, the movement announced what it described as the first public attempt to establish a settlement foothold inside Syrian territory, saying a group of its activists had crossed the border to “place the first stake in the area.”
It was not long before Israeli forces detained the participants and evacuated them from the site, but the movement used the incident to launch a petition demanding that the Israeli security cabinet approve the establishment of settlements in the area.
Political moves
Alongside its first attempts at infiltration, the movement worked to rally political and popular support for its project. In late November 2025, it organized a conference in Jerusalem that coincided with activists from the movement crossing the border. It said hundreds of people took part, demanding that the Israeli government allow settlements to be established in the area and declaring support for the field actions carried out by the activists.
A number of figures associated with the religious and nationalist right took part in the conference, including Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin and right-wing activist Baruch Marzel, alongside academics and pro-settlement activists.
The movement’s activity was not limited to organizing conferences. It later called on its supporters to exert direct pressure on Knesset members and Israeli officials to prevent any withdrawal from the areas entered by Israeli occupation forces in southern Syria.
It also announced that it had held a meeting with Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, during which, it said, it presented its vision for establishing settlements in the area, along with discussing issues related to infrastructure and services in what it describes as “Bashan.”
Security rhetoric to justify settlement
As its activity on the ground expanded, the movement’s rhetoric also underwent a noticeable shift. By late November 2025, it had escalated its discourse, arguing that establishing settlements in the area it calls “Bashan” was a security necessity, repeating the slogan: “No security without settlement.”
In the wake of the ambush in which Israeli forces were caught in the town of Beit Jinn on the slopes of Mount Hermon, the movement adopted a narrative linking members of Syria’s General Security to the attack on Israeli forces, arguing that the confrontation was not limited to “armed groups” but also included the new Syrian authorities.
The movement’s rhetoric shifted from demanding settlement as a “historic right” to presenting it as a “security solution,” and then to explicitly calling for demographic change in southern Syria, with the movement openly urging the displacement of the Sunni residents of Daraa province. It argued that failing to do so would lead, in its view, to Syrian forces it described as “al-Jolani’s soldiers” reaching the Golan and Jerusalem.
On Dec. 2, 2025, the movement announced the release of activists detained after attempting to cross the border into Syrian territory, presenting their release as a success for the movement and using it to continue its campaign calling for settlements in the area.
In a post in early December 2025, the movement seized on remarks by Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa calling for “Israel” to withdraw from the areas it had seized in southern Syria, using them to call for accelerating its settlement project.
It argued that growing international pressure on “Israel” to withdraw from the buffer zone made it necessary, from its perspective, to speed up the establishment of Jewish settlements in southern Syria in order to entrench Israeli control over the area and prevent any future withdrawal.
The movement also continued to use religious occasions to promote its field activities. On the eighth day of Hanukkah, it reposted footage from an attempt to establish a settlement point in “Bashan,” describing those involved as “brave pioneers” and claiming they had received “broad support from soldiers.”
This rhetoric comes as part of the movement’s effort to suggest that its actions enjoy support within the occupation army and to portray its relationship with it as one of sympathy. Israeli forces had previously intervened on several occasions to evacuate settlers who crossed the border and detained some of them.
How did the methods of infiltration evolve?
In its early stages, the movement’s activity was limited to brief crossings into Syrian territory, which often ended with Israeli forces intervening to remove participants or detain them for several hours before releasing them. But the movement presented each operation as another step toward entrenching its project and used it in the media to rally more supporters and pressure the Israeli government.
Over time, the crossings expanded to include dozens of participants, and the movement began choosing specific sites inside the area entered by Israeli occupation forces after 2025, most notably around the summit of Mount Hermon, the village of Bir Ajam and areas in the Quneitra countryside.
In one infiltration attempt, a group of the movement’s activists reached the outskirts of Bir Ajam, a village with a Circassian majority in the Quneitra countryside.
The movement said one of the participants, an Arabic speaker, spoke with several residents there, claiming that those he spoke to expressed support for the establishment of Jewish settlements and for imposing Israeli control over the area.
The movement used this account to present settlement as a means of entrenching military control, citing settlement experiences in the West Bank and arguing that a “civilian” presence is what guarantees the long-term survival of a military presence, while calling on the Israeli government to allow the creation of “facts on the ground.”
Imposing a fait accompli
Talk of “creating facts on the ground” is reflected in the methods it uses on the ground, which overlap in several respects with patterns employed by settler movements during the early stages of establishing settlements in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the occupied Golan Heights.
These methods include repeated entries into targeted areas, establishing a temporary “civilian” presence, and speaking of “core families” prepared to settle there, alongside pressure on the Israeli government to recognize the fait accompli.
The model of the Gush Emunim movement stands out as one of the clearest examples of this pattern. It was a religious-nationalist movement active between 1974 and 1988 that played a pivotal role in advancing the settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories, according to the Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies “Madar.”
The movement was built on the idea that Jews have a right to settle throughout what it considers the “Land of Israel,” and in a number of cases it relied on creating a presence on the ground before obtaining official approval.
One of the clearest examples was the movement’s attempts to establish a settlement in the Sebastia area near Nablus in 1975. Its activists repeatedly entered the site and set up temporary camps despite initial objections from the Israeli government, before political and field pressure eventually led to permission for a nearby settlement, a precedent that later became a model repeated in the establishment of other settlements and settlement outposts.
From activists to families
As its activity escalated, the movement began changing the makeup of those taking part in infiltration operations. After relying on groups of activists, it later announced that 10 families and dozens of young people, including women and children, had tried to enter the city of Quneitra with the aim of settling there.
According to its account, Israeli forces asked them to leave the site, but it said the forces kept some of the participants within the vicinity for a period of time, in a move reflecting the movement’s shift from organizing crossing attempts carried out by activists to involving families in field activities.
Over time, the movement’s rhetoric also saw marked escalation. In one of its posts, it published text explicitly calling for the expulsion of Sunni and Shiite residents from the “Bashan” region, using religious language urging their elimination and linking that to the return of Jews to the area.
Overnight stays and building sites: the latest stage of escalation
By the spring and summer of 2026, the movement’s incursions had begun to take the form of attempts to establish a continuous “civilian” presence inside the areas controlled by the Israeli occupation army in southern Syria.
On the 78th anniversary of the “declaration of the establishment of Israel,” the movement carried out a new infiltration attempt, saying dozens of its activists crossed the “old border” into an area under Israeli control in southern Syria.
It said the participants fortified themselves atop one of the buildings, declaring that they would remain there until what it described as the movement’s “core families” were allowed to enter and live there, in reference to settler groups being prepared to establish new settlements.
On April 22, the movement crossed the border fence at the slopes of Mount Hermon, between Majdal Shams and the town of Hader, with 50 activists, aiming to “fortify” themselves at the site and demand permission for what it calls its “core families” to establish a settlement in the area.
The movement said the participants reached the Tal al-Sarkhat area inside the buffer zone seized by “Israel” and climbed onto the roof of one of the buildings in an attempt to prolong their stay and complicate efforts to evacuate them.
It added that the move was carried out according to what it described as a “policy of nonviolence,” stressing that the participants limited themselves to passive sit-ins without resistance. It also relayed a message from them to the Israeli government saying the “core families” were ready to move to the site as soon as they received official approval, at which point the activists would leave.
The movement said Israeli forces arrived at the site and then evacuated the participants and returned them beyond the border fence, before concluding its post by calling for the remainder of the current government’s term to be used to “impose facts on the ground” through the establishment of settlements.
As “Israeli Jerusalem Day” approached the anniversary of “Israel’s” occupation and control of the Old City and East Jerusalem the movement announced that a group of its activists had entered the Mount Hermon summit area.
Crossing operations were no longer limited to a single group and instead began to be carried out repeatedly and in an organized fashion, as two additional groups of the movement’s activists tried to reach the Mount Hermon summit area as part of activities it organized to coincide with the anniversary of “Israel’s” occupation of the Golan in the 1967 war.
The movement said one of the two groups was stopped by Israeli forces before its members were later released, while the second group continued its ascent toward the mountain.
The movement did not stop at a single crossing attempt, but repeated its incursions in succession, in an effort to keep the issue of settlement at the forefront and maintain pressure on the occupation government to approve settlements in the areas entered by the Israeli army after 2025.
On May 18, the movement announced a new infiltration attempt, saying 13 of its activists crossed the “old border” at night near the settlement of Aloni Habashan, after a series of other attempts carried out earlier that same day toward the Mount Hermon summit area. It noted that the area entered by the activists includes an Israeli military site, but stressed that military presence alone is not enough.
It also announced that it had organized an event at the Quneitra overlook in cooperation with a group called “Golani Habashan,” which describes itself as including residents of the Golan Heights who support the establishment of settlements in southern Syria.
Organizing women-led protests
On June 15, a group of women settlers from the movement organized a protest near the fence in the Golan Heights, rejecting what it described as “political pressure” calling for “Israel” to withdraw from the areas it controls in southern Syria.
It also crossed with about 100 of the movement’s settlers what it describes as the “old border” toward the Mount Hermon summit area on July 5, with the aim of positioning themselves there and beginning what it described as “Israeli civilian settlement.”
The movement linked this step to recent security developments in southern Syria, arguing that relying solely on military presence without establishing settlements could, in its words, lead to a repeat of the “security belt” experience that “Israel” established in southern Lebanon.
The movement also announced that a number of its settlers spent a full night in the Mount Hermon area, inside the zone controlled by “Israel” in southern Syria, describing the step as a new stage in its efforts to establish a permanent settler presence.
It said it had informed the Israeli army in advance of the activity, without disclosing the settlers’ exact location, to avoid any security misunderstanding.
On July 13, two of the movement’s settlers crossed what it describes as the “old border” toward the Mount Hermon area, where they remained for long hours near the outskirts of the town of Hader in the Quneitra countryside and began building a rudimentary wooden structure at the site.
It also announced that a number of its settlers crossed the “old border” and positioned themselves at a site it said had been selected in advance, beginning to prepare it for the establishment of a settlement point. It added that they spent the night there before other settlers joined them the following day.
The movement said Israeli occupation forces began moving by evening to evacuate the site, noting that some settlers this time chose to hide as the forces approached, unlike what it described as its previous approach. It justified that by citing fears that force might be used during the evacuation operations, and said it had informed the army in advance that those at the site were Israeli “civilians.”
With the latest infiltration attempts, it is clear that over roughly a year the movement has moved from calling for settlement to carrying out repeated attempts to impose a “civilian” presence inside the areas controlled by Israeli occupation forces in southern Syria.
Although all of these attempts ended with the Israeli army intervening to evacuate the participants, the evolution of the movement’s tools from calls and conferences to involving “core families,” overnight stays and preparing sites for settlement reflects an escalating trajectory aimed at turning military control into a permanent settlement reality by imposing facts on the ground before obtaining an official political decision.