Damascus. — Israeli forces in southern Syria stormed a village and opened fire when confronted by residents on Friday, killing at least 13 people, Syrian authorities reported. This is the deadliest Israeli attack since its troops took a strip of southern Syria a year ago.
The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the attack as a “horrible massacre” and noted that among the dead were women and children.
The Syrian state news agency SANA reported that Israeli forces stormed the village of Beit Jin with the aim of arresting local men and opened intense fire after being confronted by residents. Dozens of families fled the area.
Israel revealed on Friday that it carried out an operation to arrest suspects from the Jamaa Islamiya militia group in Beit Jin who were planning attacks with improvised explosive devices and rockets towards Israel. It added that during the raid, several militiamen fired at Israeli soldiers, wounding six of them, and the troops responded to the fire, including air support. It indicated that the operation had concluded, all suspects were arrested, and several militiamen were killed.
A local official in the village, Walid Okasha, told The Associated Press that the dead were civilians. Among the deceased were a man, his wife, their two children and his brother, as well as another man who had celebrated his wedding the day before.
Firas Daher, a resident of Beit Jin, told the AP that the troops stormed in around 3:00 in the morning and were met with “light resistance, with light weapons.” The troops responded with drones and helicopters and heavy machine gun fire.
“Every time someone moved inside the village or any car moved, they were attacked. When we tried to take the injured people to the hospital, they attacked the vehicle that was transporting them,” he said.
Since the fall of Syrian ex-president Bashar Assad in December 2024, Israeli forces have taken over an area in southern Syria that was previously a buffer zone patrolled by the UN under a 1974 separation agreement. Troops have regularly carried out operations in villages and towns inside and outside the zone, including raids to capture people suspected of being militants. Israel has launched hundreds of air strikes on Syrian military sites and has pushed for a demilitarized zone south of Damascus.
Israeli incursions have been met several times by armed local residents. In April, troops stormed the city of Nawa, and when confronted by residents, the army carried out airstrikes on the city, killing nine people. A month earlier, Israeli forces killed six civilians in the village of Koayiah in similar clashes during a raid.
In a previous raid in Beit Jin in June, Israeli forces captured several people they said were members of Hamas — a claim rejected by residents — and killed a man who, according to his family, suffered from schizophrenia.
Israel says it took the 400-square-kilometer (155-square-mile) demilitarized buffer zone in southern Syria as a preventative measure to prevent militants from heading to the area after Islamist insurgents overthrew Assad. It adds that the measure is temporary, but critics accuse Israel of taking advantage of the unrest in Syria to commit another land grab. Israel still controls the Golan Heights it captured from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed, a capture that is still rejected by most of the international community.
The Syrian authorities have condemned the Israeli incursions as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty. On Friday, the government called on the international community to take “urgent measures” to stop the Israeli incursions.
