Turkiye and Israel face mounting tensions over future of post-Assad Syria

Turkiye and Israel face mounting tensions over future of post-Assad Syria
Dozens of Syrian Druze clerics crossed the armistice line on the Golan Heights into Israel on Fon March 14 for their community’s first pilgrimage to the revered shrine in decades. (AFP)
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Updated 15 March 2025
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Turkiye and Israel face mounting tensions over future of post-Assad Syria

Turkiye and Israel face mounting tensions over future of post-Assad Syria
  • Turkiye, which long backed groups opposed to Assad, has emerged as a key player in Syria and is advocating for a stable and united Syria
  • Israel on the other hand, remains deeply suspicious of Syria’s interim government and Turkiye’s influence over Damascus

ANKARA: The fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government has aggravated already tense relations between Turkiye and Israel, with their conflicting interests in Syria pushing the relationship toward a possible collision course.
Turkiye, which long backed groups opposed to Assad, has emerged as a key player in Syria and is advocating for a stable and united Syria, in which a central government maintains authority over the whole country.
It welcomed a breakthrough agreement that Syria’s new interim government signed this week with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, to integrate with the Syrian government and army.
Israel, on the other hand, remains deeply suspicious of Syria’s interim president, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, pointing to his roots in Al-Qaeda. It’s also wary of Turkiye’s influence over Damascus and appears to want to see Syria remain fragmented after the country under Assad was turned into a staging ground for its archenemy, Iran, and Tehran’s proxies.
“Syria has become a theater for proxy warfare between Turkiye and Israel, which clearly see each other as regional competitors,” said Asli Aydintasbas, of the Washington-based Brookings Institute.
“This is a very dangerous dynamic because in all different aspects of Syria’s transition, there is a clash of Turkish and Israeli positions.”
Following Assad’s fall, Israel seized territory in southern Syria, which Israeli officials said was aimed at keeping hostile groups away from its border. The new Syrian government and the United Nations have said Israel’s incursions violate a 1974 ceasefire agreement between the two countries and have called for Israel to withdraw. Israel has also conducted airstrikes targeting military assets left behind by Assad’s forces and has expressed plans to maintain a long-term presence in the region.
Analysts say Israel is concerned over the possibility of Turkiye expanding its military presence inside Syria. Since 2016, Turkiye has launched operations in northern Syria to push back Syrian Kurdish militias linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and maintains influence in the north of the country through military bases and alliances with groups that opposed Assad.
Turkish defense officials have said Turkiye and Syria are now cooperating to strengthen the country’s defense and security, and that a military delegation will visit Syria next week.
Nimrod Goren, president of the Mitvim Institute, an Israeli foreign policy think tank, said that unlike Turkiye, which supports a strong, centralized and stable Syria, Israel at the moment appears to prefer Syria fragmented, with the belief that could better bolster Israel’s security.
He said Israel is concerned about Al-Sharaa and his Islamist ties, and fears that his consolidated strength could pose what Israel has called a “jihadist threat” along its northern border.
Israeli officials say they will not tolerate a Syrian military presence south of Damascus and have threatened to invade a Damascus suburb in defense of members of the Druze minority sect, who live in both Israel and Syria, after short-lived clashes broke out between the new Syrian security forces and Druze armed factions. The distance from Damascus to the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights is about 60 kilometers (37 miles.)
Turkiye and Israel once were close allies, but the relationship has been marked by deep tensions under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s more than two-decade rule, despite brief periods of reconciliation. Erdogan is an outspoken critic of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, while Israel has been angered by Erdogan’s support for the Hamas militant group, which Israel considers to be a terrorist group.
Following the war in Gaza, Turkiye strongly denounced Israel’s military actions, announced it was cutting trade ties with Israel, and joined a genocide case South Africa brought against Israel at the UN International Court of Justice.
Aydintasbas said Turkish authorities are now increasingly concerned that Israel is “supportive of autonomy demands from Kurds, the Druze and Alawites.”
Erdogan issued a thinly veiled threat against Israel last week, saying: “Those who seek to provoke ethnic and religious (divisions) in Syria to exploit instability in the country should know that they will not be able to achieve their goals.”
Last week, factions allied with the new Syrian government — allegedly including some backed by Turkiye — launched revenge attacks on members of Assad’s Alawite minority sect after pro-Assad groups attacked government security forces on Syria’s coast. Monitoring groups said hundreds of civilians were killed.
Erdogan strongly condemned the violence and suggested the attacks were aimed at “Syria’s territorial integrity and social stability.”
Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Sharren Haskel, said the deadly sectarian violence amounted to “ethnic cleansing” by Islamist groups led by “a jihadist Islamist terror group that took Damascus by force and was supported by Turkiye.”
Israel, Haskel added, was working to prevent a threat along its border from Syria’s new “jihadist regime.”
Israel’s involvement in Syria is deepening, with the country pledging protection and economic aid to the Druze community in southern Syria at a time of heightened sectarian tensions.
The Druze, a small religious sect, are caught between Syria’s new Islamist-led government in Damascus and Israel, which many Syrians view as a hostile neighbor leveraging the Druze’s plight to justify its intervention in the region. Israel says it sent food aid trucks to the Druze in southern Syria and is allowing some Syrian Druze to cross into the Israeli-controlled part of the Golan Heights to work.
Al-Sharaa was somewhat conciliatory toward Israel in his early statements, saying that he didn’t seek a conflict. But his language has become stronger. In a speech at a recent Arab League emergency meeting in Cairo, he said that Israel’s “aggressive expansion is not only a violation of Syrian sovereignty, but a direct threat to security and peace in the entire region.”
The Brookings Institute’s Aydintasbas said the escalating tensions are cause for serious concern.
“Before we used to have Israel and Turkiye occasionally engage in spats, but be able to decouple their security relationship from everything else,” Aydintasbas said. “But right now, they are actively trying to undermine each other. The question is, do these countries know each other’s red lines?”
A report from the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank led by a former Israeli military intelligence chief, suggested that Israel could benefit from engaging with Turkiye, the one regional power with considerable influence over Syria’s leadership, to reduce the risk of military conflict between Israel and Syria.


Trump heads to UAE as it hopes to advance AI ambitions

Trump heads to UAE as it hopes to advance AI ambitions
Updated 7 sec ago
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Trump heads to UAE as it hopes to advance AI ambitions

Trump heads to UAE as it hopes to advance AI ambitions
DOHA: US President Donald Trump was due to end a brief trip to Qatar with a speech to US troops on Thursday then fly to the United Arab Emirates, where leaders hope for US help to make the wealthy Gulf nation a global leader in artificial intelligence.
The US has a preliminary agreement with the UAE to allow it to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips a year, starting this year, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
The deal would boost the country’s construction of data centers vital to developing artificial intelligence models.
A string of business agreements has been inked during Trump’s four-day swing through the Gulf region, including a deal for Qatar Airways to purchase up to 210 Boeing widebody jets, a $600 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to invest in the US and $142 billion in US arms sales to the Kingdom.
The trip has also brought a flurry of diplomacy. Trump made a surprise announcement on Tuesday that the US will remove longstanding sanctions on Syria and subsequently met with Syrian interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa.
On Thursday, Trump will address US troops at the Al Udeid Air Base, which is in the desert southwest of Doha and hosts the largest US military facility in the Middle East. He then flies to Abu Dhabi to meet with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and other leaders.
AI is likely to be a focus for the final leg of Trump’s trip.
Former President Joe Biden’s administration had imposed strict oversight of exports of US AI chips to the Middle East and other regions. Among the Biden administration’s fears were that the prized semiconductors would be diverted to China and buttress Beijing’s military strength.
Trump has made improving ties with some Gulf countries a key goal of his administration. If all the proposed chip deals in Gulf states, and the UAE in particular, come together, the region would become a third power center in global AI competition after the United States and China.
Trump had dangled the possibility of making a side trip to Turkiye to join Russia-Ukraine talks before returning to Washington, but a US official said on Wednesday that the president would not make that stop.

Two Israelis, one pregnant, wounded in occupied West Bank: authorities

Two Israelis, one pregnant, wounded in occupied West Bank: authorities
Updated 15 May 2025
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Two Israelis, one pregnant, wounded in occupied West Bank: authorities

Two Israelis, one pregnant, wounded in occupied West Bank: authorities
  • Bruchin is an Israeli settlement built on West Bank land without the Israeli authorities’ approval which was retroactively legalized by the Israeli government

JERUSALEM: Two Israeli civilians including a pregnant woman were wounded on Wednesday when shots were fired at their vehicle in the occupied West Bank, according to Israeli authorities.

An Israeli army statement said “a terrorist opened fire on an Israeli vehicle” near Bruchin, an Israeli settlement in the center of the Palestinian territory considered illegal under international law.

“Two Israeli civilians were wounded” in the attack and are being treated, the statement added.

The Beilinson hospital said a woman taken there was pregnant.

“Medical teams are currently fighting in the traumatology ward to save the life of the woman and that of her fetus,” a hospital spokesperson said.

Emergency services had earlier said the woman driver, who was aged about 30, was “in a critical state with gunshot wounds.”

A male passenger around the age of 40 was “in a grave state,” emergency services added.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “deeply shocked by the horrific terrorist attack against a woman in advanced pregnancy and her husband.”

“This abhorrent incident precisely reflects the difference between us, who desire and bring life, and the reprehensible terrorists, whose goal is to kill us and destroy life,” he said in the statement released by his office.

Since the beginning of the Gaza war, sparked by Palestinian militant group Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the West Bank has seen an upsurge in violence.

Bruchin is an Israeli settlement built on West Bank land without the Israeli authorities’ approval which was retroactively legalized by the Israeli government.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967, and Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory are considered illegal under international law.


US-backed aid group to start work in Gaza by end of May

US-backed aid group to start work in Gaza by end of May
Updated 15 May 2025
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US-backed aid group to start work in Gaza by end of May

US-backed aid group to start work in Gaza by end of May
  • The newly created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will instead distribute aid in Gaza from so-called secure distribution sites

UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON: A US-backed humanitarian organization said on Wednesday that it would launch operations in Gaza by the end of May and has asked Israel to allow aid to start flowing into the enclave now under existing procedures until it is set up.

No humanitarian aid has been delivered to Gaza since March 2, and a global hunger monitor has warned that half a million people face starvation, a quarter of the enclave’s population. Since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, aid deliveries have been handled by international aid groups and UN organizations.

The newly created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will instead distribute aid in Gaza from so-called secure distribution sites, but said Israel’s current plan to only allow a few such sites in southern Gaza needed to be scaled up to include the north.

“GHF emphasizes that a successful humanitarian response must eventually include the entire civilian population in Gaza,” the foundation’s executive director, Jake Wood, wrote in a letter to the Israeli government.

“GHF respectfully requests that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) identify and deconflict sufficient locations in northern Gaza capable of hosting GHF operated secure distribution sites that can be made operational within thirty days,” he wrote.

He asked Israel to facilitate the flow of enough aid “using existing modalities” until GHF’s distribution infrastructure is fully operational, saying this is essential to “alleviate the ongoing humanitarian pressure, as well as decrease the pressure on the distribution sites during our first days of operation.”

US security firm UG Solutions and US-based Safe Reach Solutions, which does logistics and planning, would be involved in the foundation’s operations, said a source familiar with the plans, speaking on condition of anonymity.

UN, AID GROUPS CONCERNED

Following the GHF announcement, the International Committee of the Red Cross said concerns about aid distribution remained.

“Humanitarian aid should not be politicized nor militarized. The level of need among civilians in Gaza right now is overwhelming, and aid needs to be allowed to enter immediately and without impediment,” said ICRC spokesperson Steve Dorsey.

Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid, which the Palestinian militant group denies, and is blocking humanitarian deliveries until Hamas releases all remaining hostages.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said earlier on Wednesday that Israel endorsed what he called “the American humanitarian plan.” Israel’s mission to the UN did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wood’s letter.


Iran to hold nuclear talks with Europeans this week

Iran to hold nuclear talks with Europeans this week
Updated 56 min 57 sec ago
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Iran to hold nuclear talks with Europeans this week

Iran to hold nuclear talks with Europeans this week
  • Friday’s meeting will follow the latest round of Oman-mediated Iran-US talks on Sunday, which Tehran described as ‘difficult but useful’

TEHRAN: Iran will hold a fresh round of nuclear talks with European powers in Turkiye later this week, its Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.

The talks with Britain, France and Germany would be held in Istanbul on Friday, ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said, quoted by state news agency IRNA.

French diplomatic sources gave the same information, but there was still no word from Berlin or London on the meeting which was originally slated for earlier this month but postponed.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the talks would be held “at the level of deputy foreign ministers.”

The European nations — known as the E3 — were among the world powers that negotiated the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal along with China, Russia and the United States.

Donald Trump, in his first term as president, effectively torpedoed the accord in 2018 by unilaterally withdrawing the US.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has revived his “maximum pressure” campaign on Tehran, backing nuclear diplomacy but warning of military action if it fails.

Iran has held several discreet meetings on the nuclear agenda with the E3 since late last year — most recently in February in Geneva — ahead of indirect negotiations with Washington that began on April 12.

“While we continue the dialogue with the United States, we are also ready to talk with the Europeans,” Araghchi said.

“Unfortunately, the Europeans themselves have become somewhat isolated in these negotiations with their own policies,” he added, without elaborating.

“We do not want such a situation and that’s why we have continued our negotiations” with them, he said.

Friday’s meeting will follow the latest round of Oman-mediated Iran-US talks on Sunday, which Tehran described as “difficult but useful” while a US official said Washington was “encouraged.”

Iran and the United States have so far held four rounds of talks, the highest-level contact in years between the long-time foes, since the US abandoned the 2015 nuclear accord.

Western countries, including the United States, have long accused Iran of seeking to acquire atomic weapons, while Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

European governments are currently weighing whether to trigger the “snapback” mechanism under the 2015 deal, which would reinstate UN sanctions in response to Iranian non-compliance — an option that expires in October.

On Tuesday, Trump criticized Iran’s leadership, regional role, alleged mismanagement, and threatened to slash its oil exports if nuclear talks fail.

“Iran’s leaders have focused on stealing their people’s wealth to fund terror and bloodshed abroad,” said Trump at a Saudi investment forum.

He reiterated his willingness to “make a deal with Iran” but threatened to impose “massive maximum pressure,” including driving Iranian oil exports to zero if talks failed.

Araghchi dismissed the remarks as a “very deceptive view” of Iran and blamed US sanctions, pressure and both military and non-military threats for hindering the country’s progress.


Jordanian King discusses Gaza with UK national security adviser

Jordanian King discusses Gaza with UK national security adviser
Updated 14 May 2025
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Jordanian King discusses Gaza with UK national security adviser

Jordanian King discusses Gaza with UK national security adviser
  • King Abdullah emphasized the urgent need to reinstate the ceasefire in Gaza
  • He commended the UK’s role in promoting stability in the region

LONDON: King Abdullah II of Jordan met UK National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell at Al-Husseiniya Palace to discuss regional developments on Wednesday.

King Abdullah highlighted the significance of the relationship between Amman and London and the cooperation in various sectors, including defense, during the meeting that Crown Prince Hussein also attended.

He emphasized the urgent need to reinstate the ceasefire in Gaza, resume the flow of humanitarian aid and rebuild the Palestinian coastal enclave without displacing its residents, the Petra news agency reported.

They discussed the current events in the occupied West Bank and new developments in Syria. King Abdullah commended the UK’s role in promoting stability in the region, Petra added.

The meeting was attended by Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, the director of the King’s office, Alaa Batayneh, Ambassador to the UK Manar Dabbas, Director of the General Intelligence Department Maj. Gen. Ahmad Husni, and British Ambassador to Jordan Philip Hall.