Caught between a seemingly absent Syrian government and a growing Israeli presence, Mount Hermon’s Druze villages are waiting for a clarity neither Damascus nor Tel Aviv seems willing to provide. The post Syria’s forgotten villages: Mount Hermon’s Druze between Damascus and the IDF appeared first o
Caught between a seemingly absent Syrian government and a growing Israeli presence, Mount Hermon’s Druze villages are waiting for a clarity neither Damascus nor Tel Aviv seems willing to provide.
4 June 2026
MOUNT HERMON FOOTHILLS — From Qatana, a multi-ethnic town in the countryside southwest of Damascus, the road to Mount Hermon—known in Syria as Jabal al-Sheikh— winds upward through a string of five Druze villages hugging the slope below the fiercely contested peak.
In Beqaasem—a Druze village at the junction of Lebanon, Syria, and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights—spray-painted words covered the side of an unmanned checkpoint on the morning of May 7. “Don’t forget the blood of your people,” the graffiti read, invoking the memory of Druze fighters and civilians killed in July 2025 during clashes with Bedouin tribal fighters and Syrian government forces in the country’s southern Suwayda province.
Emerging from a house down the road, an elderly man approached, his eyes shifting from our camera lenses to the empty street. “This isn’t Syria anymore,” he warned. “The Israelis, they have observatories up there, they could come and arrest you at any moment.”
The Druze villages of Mount Hermon—Aissam, Qalaat Jandal, Beqaasem, Rima, Arneh—sit at a crossroads of competing forces, fractured loyalties and unhealed wounds. The footprint Israel has pressed into Syrian territory looms large, while tensions sown by the Assad regime among the villages and their Christian and Sunni neighbors live on, inflamed by last year’s killing in Suwayda.
Caught between a seemingly absent Syrian authority and a growing Israeli presence, the people here are waiting for a clarity neither Damascus nor Tel Aviv seems willing to provide.
In Rima, the small Druze village directly after Beqaasem, three Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) vehicles sat parked in the town square, accompanied by an ambulance. Israeli soldiers played with local children as locals passed unalarmed.Video of the scene later posted online clarified this was a visit by Ghassan Alyyan, an Israeli-Druze major general serving as the IDF’s military liaison officer. This May morning, the crossing barely registered as an event.
Israeli forces first seized control of Syria’s Jabal al-Sheikh outpost on the peak of Mount Hermon immediately after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, but did not initially venture south into the mountain villages below. That changed in July 2025, following the events in Suwayda.
Fandi Emad, the mukhtar of Aissam—the first and smallest of the six Druze villages on the mountain road—said locals felt a “sense of relief” when IDF patrols first appeared in the villages last July. The reason was practical: with the Israeli presence in the area, the new Syrian government’s Internal Security Forces (General Security) do not enter Aissam, he added.
Fandi Emad, the mukhtar of the Druze village of Aissam, stands in front of solar panels at the entrance of the village, 7/5/2026 (Hicham El Bouhmidi/Collectif DR/Syria Direct)
This local administrative vacuum opened the door for an Israeli presence that is part of a grander regional strategy. Israel’s July 2025 airstrike on Damascus’s Ministry of Defense and its open support for Suwayda’s fighters served as a public adoption of Syria’s Druze. The intervention was declared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who publicly committed the IDF to shielding the Druze community in Syria.
In the months that followed, visits from Israeli military emissaries to local Druze villages became a normalized presence. But this tailored diplomacy disappears the moment Israeli forces cross into non-Druze territory.
In Beit Jinn—a Sunni-majority village west of the cluster of Druze villages—there are no friendly handshakes. Here, the ground still bears the scars of November 2025, when a midnight Israeli cross-border raid sparked fierce street fighting and shelling that left 13 Syrians dead and six IDF soldiers wounded.
Viewing these Sunni areas through a lens of hostility, Israel bypassed diplomacy and resorted to an iron-fist approach. Abdullah al-Safadi, an elder from Beit Jinn who lost his son to the crossfire, does not conceal his bitterness. “We haven’t received any visits,” he said, lamenting Israel’s use of excessive force over communication and engagement with village leaders.
Abdullah al-Safadi stands outside his house in the village of Beit Jinn, which still bears the traces of fighting during an Israeli cross-border raid in November 2025, during which his son was killed, 16/5/2026 (Hicham El Bouhmidi/Collectif DR/Syria Direct)
This aggressive containment extends far beyond Beit Jinn. Throughout the Sunni-majority areas of Quneitra and Daraa, United Nations (UN) reporting documents a highly disruptive Israeli operational footprint: a pattern of midnight raids, arbitrary detentions, and strict security restrictions that routinely prevent local farmers from accessing their border lands.
By favoring one community while choking another, Israel’s tactical duality deepens sectarian tensions, leaving the Hermon Druze exposed to the resentment of their Sunni neighbors.
Following the shelling of Beit Jinn, notables from most nearby Druze villages and areas came to personally offer their condolences, but others from villages like Aissam and Beqaasem preferred phone calls to an official visit. Al-Safadi praised the ties he has with his Druze neighbors, however, attributing the absence of some notables to “the Israeli presence there, perhaps because of the aid they are receiving and their desire to maintain the ties.”
Yet while some in surrounding villages see an alliance, the view inside the Druze villages is one of survival rather than partnership.
“The Israeli presence is not in anyone’s control,” said Sheikh Deeb Abdulsamad, a spiritual leader from Qalaat Jandal—one of the larger villages in the Druze cluster—and head of the local agricultural association. “This government may come and go, Israel may come and take over. In all cases, we are Syrians and our loyalty is to our land.”
Abdulsamad criticized a lack of state support for seeds, fertilizers, and agricultural insecticides, but praised state officials’ diplomatic approach to Hermon’s Druze. “They avoid a forceful presence to spare people the conflict,” he said, recalling an official visit this past January by Hassan al-Zain, a state representative with a solid reputation among local Druze populations.
But keeping the land alive without the support typically provided by the Syrian state’s agricultural infrastructure remains a desperate battle. Further precarity hit during the mid-2025 Suwayda crisis, when local sources say flour supplies were cut off from these mountain villages for five days—an act that locals in Qalaat Jandal interpreted as an instrument of coercion.
During this time, families across the Hermon villages relied on aid assembled by their relatives from Druze villages in the neighboring Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Sheikh Abdulsamad was careful to draw the distinction: “The aid is not from the Israeli government,” he explained, “but rather from our cousins in the Golan.”
Today, those same cross-border cousins are pooling donations to build a hospital in Qalaat Jandal. Abdulsamad stresses that the project is not exclusionary, “being built to serve the entire region, Druze and Sunni alike.”
Whether by design or not, the cross-border assistance consolidates a pattern: Israel and fellow Druze across the ceasefire line are present, and the Syrian state is absent. The hospital being built in Qalaat Jandal may serve the whole region, but the network that enabled it runs through the occupied Golan, not through Damascus.
Writing on a wall surrounding a hospital being built in Qalaat Jandal. The Druze civil society in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights is allegedly funding the construction. It reads “Jabal al-Sheikh Hospital,” 7/5/2026 (Hicham El Bouhmidi/Collectif DR/Syria Direct)
The sense of being caught between opposing forces is felt most sharply by those who doubt whether the current dynamic in Mount Hermon’s villages can be sustained.
Abu Bahaa (a pseudonym), a Druze farmer from Arneh—the last village on the road before the mountain meets the Lebanese border—speaks plainly about what Israel’s presence actually amounts to on the ground. “Israel is not helping us solve our problems,” he said. “We are living in a void… They don’t even engage with us or tell us their plans.”
The ambiguity is itself a form of pressure. A community left to guess its own political future is easier to manage than one that has made a decision.
That uncertainty looks very different from the other side of the sectarian divide. In Beit Tima, a Sunni farming village just south of Qalaat Jandal, the mood toward the Druze villages is one of cold distance. Abu Nasser (a pseudonym), a farmer who has spent his entire life there, did not hesitate: “They are a card in the hand of Israel. If an agreement happens between us and Israel, who would care about their fate?”
This view reflects the dangerous proxy trap catching the Hermon Druze. To their Sunni neighbors, IDF patrols and Golan aid packages imply an alliance—a belief that flattens the Hermon and Suwayda Druze into a single political identity, despite their distinct realities.
Since late 2024, Israel has actively supplied the Druze in the Suwayda with military assistance, weapon drops and monthly stipends for the local National Guard faction. The idea of self-determination and separation from Damascus gained massive momentum in Suwayda in the wake of last year’s violence, but did not echo as widely in Hermon, where locals chose a more reserved approach.
The logic of survival and alliances is a reality villagers here never chose. In the absence of the state, and amid a wave of hate speech and sectarian division, Hermon’s Druze have not chosen Israel, but cautiously accepted the closest hand extended into their isolation. By viewing them merely as a “card,” neighbors inadvertently help realize what is arguably Israel’s goal: deepening local divisions to keep the border volatile and exploitable.
The Israeli military base of Tal Bardayah in the Mount Hermon area, as seen from the road to Beit Jinn. The base is located on Syrian territory, a few kilometers east of the Bravo demarcation line, 16/5/2026 (Hicham El Bouhmidi/Collectif DR/Syria Direct)
If there is a face the Syrian transitional government has chosen to show the Hermon Druze, it is not uniformed and does not come in convoys. It arrives carefully, through trusted intermediaries, calibrated to avoid provoking the very tensions it is trying to defuse.
One Syrian security official appointed to manage the western Damascus countryside, interviewed on condition of anonymity, was measured and deliberate. He described strict instructions from higher command to treat all communities equally, regardless of sect.
“When Sunnis commit crimes, they don’t get any special treatment…we are not here for revenge,” he said. “The previous regime,” he added, “spent decades sowing division between communities.”
As for the Israeli presence, “it is a matter of sovereignty, which is beyond our authority,” the official said. He pushed back against the idea that Israel’s engagement with Mount Hermon’s Druze villages has translated into any meaningful support for local life, despite the narrative of a strategic partnership that has formed around IDF visits and aid from Golan neighbors.
“Israel is not helping people there in cases of local conflicts,” he said, adding that its presence has not complicated Syrian officials’ coordination with local Druze sheikhs, whose role as mediators between the community and the state he praised.
But the gap between the state’s intentions and its actual footprint is nowhere more visible than in Arneh. Farmer Abu Bahaa described a community that has received no official visits, maintains its own water pumps and electricity networks and sees hate speech circulate online without consequence. What he wants, above all, is consistent law enforcement. “That,” he says, “is the only way states can be built.”
Some see a possible path forward in Jaramana—a multi-ethnic Damascus suburb where, following 2025 communal violence, local Druze fighters were integrated into the Ministry of Interior’s Internal Security Forces, policing the suburb alongside fighters from different backgrounds. The model is imperfect, but it offers ground for inclusion and better representation.
Whether that model can reach Mount Hermon, where Israel has stated it intends to remain, is the question no one can yet answer. The longer a community is left alone, the more foreign the idea of being governed begins to feel. Whether Damascus can reach Mount Hermon’s Druze villages before the weight of everyone else’s strategies makes that choice for them remains an open question.
A version of this reporting was also published in French by Orient XXI
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