Ali Riad's tomb is adorned with a single red rose that his brother, Abdalá, waters every day. "He died against the Zionists on April 3, 2025", reads the marble tombstone. Abdalá, 20, was with Ali, ten years his senior, that day. They were having tea in Nawa at noon when someone called them: "The Israelis are coming!"
A group of city residents jumped on their motorcycles, grabbed their machine guns, and headed towards a nearby wasteland, where they began to confront the Israeli armored column advancing towards the southern city. "There were about 25 of us. We started surrounding the Israelis while shooting, but they sent drones. A projectile killed my brother, and a piece of shrapnel wounded me in the leg," Abdalá recalls in front of the cemetery where the nine victims of the confrontation were buried.
They were all former members of the insurgency that fought against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad. Abdalá started fighting when he was 15. His brother almost lost his life in 2018 when a tank projectile fragment injured him in the head. "He survived the regime and was killed by the Israelis. We are eager for them to return to start another war," the young man says, expressing the same desire for revenge as the rebels who fought against the Assad regime.
The confrontation between locals and Israelis that took place in Nawa, in the Daraa province in southern Syria, occurred on the same April 3 when the Tel Aviv air force attacked targets in Homs and Hama, an offensive that is part of the constant bombings and incursions carried out by the neighboring country's troops in Syria since Bashar Assad's escape.
On the 26th of last month, Israeli airstrikes reached a suburb of the capital, Damascus, when their air force bombed the Al Kiswah area, resulting in six dead Syrian soldiers.
According to a report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on the same day, since the beginning of this year - after the end of the dictatorship - Israel has attacked various targets in Syria almost a hundred times, resulting in at least 55 deaths and dozens of injuries. These recurring actions add to the hundreds of bombings carried out in December, coinciding with the collapse of the Assad regime.
The latest of these attacks occurred early Tuesday morning. The Syrian Foreign Ministry accused Tel Aviv of bombing targets in the cities of Homs and Latakia.
Israel's repeated aggressions have heightened the instability of the new Syrian administration, led by Ahmed al Sharaa, who not only has to deal with direct attacks from Tel Aviv's troops but also with their advances in the south of the country and their support for Druze separatism in the Sweida region.
It was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself who sparked significant controversy throughout the Middle East - not just in Syria - by declaring in August that he remained faithful to the so-called Greater Israel project, a vision that aims to expand the Jewish state into several Arab countries in the region, including Syria.
Netanyahu's statements were understood throughout the region as an allusion to the messianic ideology of Jewish fundamentalism, which refers to a hypothetical right of Israel to capture territories from the Euphrates River in Iraq to the Nile River in Egypt, inspired by religious texts.
Regional concern about these statements increased when President Donald Trump's own special envoy for the Middle East, Tom Barrack, indicated on the 28th that Israel had decided to bury the borders set by the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreements, which designed the states of the Middle East following the colonial designs of England and France.
"For Israel, the lines created by Sykes-Picot are meaningless. They will go where they want, when they want, and do what they want," Barrack stated, maintaining a close relationship with Tel Aviv representatives.
The Washington representative went even further and added that Israel "has the desire and the ability to stay" in Lebanon and "has the ability to do the same in Syria".
The resurrected specter of Greater Israel is not just rhetoric. On August 18, a group of Jewish extremists entered the new strip controlled by Israel in Syria, without their own military forces' significant presence in the area preventing it, and claimed to have laid the foundation for a future settlement.
"It is our ancestral land. In the days of King David and during the Second Temple period, we lived there," said Leah Sheffer, a spokesperson for the radicals, to an Israeli media outlet, clinging to these extreme positions that prioritize religious texts over current regulations.
In Nawa - in the Daraa province - and in the neighboring Quneitra region, residents have replaced the majority aversion against the Assad dictatorship with the one they now feel towards Israeli occupation. Here, no one doubts that Tel Aviv's ultimate project is to "take over the entire south of Syria to incorporate it into the Greater Israel," in the words of Mohamed Muzeib.
As he walks through the same scenario where the April battles took place, the former member of the rebel government and former leader of the insurgents in Nawa points towards the turbines visible a few kilometers away. They are part of the wind farm that Israel has built in the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied since 1967.
"They came to attack these two hills. They are former Syrian army bases. We had to stop the youth because there were hundreds who wanted to go into battle. If they return, we are prepared. We don't have an army, but we have the weapons to form a popular resistance. The people who fought against an unjust regime will not allow more injustices," he comments, pointing to the two mounds on either side of the road that were targeted by the Israeli troops.
While Tel Aviv's military operations are not yet commonplace in Daraa, the same cannot be said for the neighboring province of Quneitra. Here, the new Syrian army has begun to deploy more controls and troops to monitor the repeated patrols organized by the Israelis in the area.
The Syrian military has taken over the former local government offices of Khan Arnabah, which were occupied by the Israelis after the fall of the dictatorship. The outline of the first base of the opposing army can be seen just over a kilometer away.
"The Israelis have occupied a dozen villages since Bashar fled in northern Quneitra. In the rest, including here, they come and go as they please. They set up checkpoints where they arbitrarily detain people," says Dirar Bashir.
A former local leader of the opposition to Bashar Assad, Bashir's home - despite its short distance from the Israeli site - is a constant stream of local citizens from the area who continue to voice their complaints about the "exactions" they accuse the Israeli soldiers of.
"Fifteen houses have been destroyed in Hamediyah [the neighboring village]. Thousands of people have had to flee from there. Dozens of young people have been detained, and many are 'missing'. When they entered here in December, I was talking to them. They told me it was only a temporary occupation, and I reminded them that they have been temporarily occupying the Golan Heights since 1967," adds Bashir.
Among the newcomers is Hassan Sadudin, 47 years old. His son Saddam was arrested in August in the village of Jubata al Khasab, a few kilometers from Khan Arnabah. "I only know that he is imprisoned in a jail in Ramallah [in the Palestinian territories]. It is not possible for the Gaza killers [referring to the Israelis] to roam freely on our streets like this," he says.
The latest victim of the Israelis in Quneitra was a young man from the village of Turnejeh, neighboring Jubata al Khashab, on the 26th of last month. "He was sleeping in a half-built house where he worked as a guard. A drone entered and exploded. The house is very close to an Israeli base. About 500 meters away. They found the body in pieces," recounts Mohamed Ghaanim, cousin of the deceased.
According to Israeli media such as The Times of Israel, Tel Aviv has established at least nine new military positions in southern Syria since December of last year, mostly in Quneitra, but also in the province of Daraa. One of them, Tulul al Humur, is only 40 kilometers from Damascus.
"The troops have been operating in areas up to about 15 kilometers" inside the territory adjacent to the Syrian Golan Heights," the newspaper's analysis added, thus adding a new strip to the geography of the Arab state controlled by Israel.
The Israeli attacks continue despite negotiations between both administrations for months, a gesture in which Ahmed Al Sharaa has invested much of his political capital, as shown by a recent survey by the Arab Center for Research and Political Studies, where an overwhelming majority of Syrians oppose any normalization with Israel (74%) and consider it a "threat" to the country (88%).
"Within HTS itself [the jihadist faction led by Al Sharaa before becoming Syrian president], there are two currents. One in favor of the pact and the other against it. I am against it. When the Israelis attacked us in Sweida, we lost hundreds of men," says Abu Qatada, a former HTS fighter and now a colonel in the Syrian army, in a conversation in Homs, where his unit is deployed.
Another former chief of the paramilitaries of Homs who fought in the civil war, the Syrian-Spanish Kinan al Nahhas, emphasizes the majority sentiment of the Syrian population. "Yes, it is true that we are weak, but we have to be on the right side of history. We feel ashamed when our government sits down to talk with Israel," he opines.
Despite the contacts, Tel Aviv has made clear its strong opposition to Damascus to the point of bombing its forces and the Syrian capital in July to halt the offensive of government forces in the Druze region of Sweida.
Syrian state television, citing words from one of the main official authorities of Sweida, General Ahmed al Dalati, stated that the government of Ahmed al Sharaa had decided to withdraw from the area "to avoid an open war with Israel."
The clashes in that region left hundreds dead - more than 2,000, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights - including a significant number who were summarily executed by both sides.
Amnesty International (AI) denounced that security forces had participated in the murder of at least 46 Druze and in humiliating actions against that community, such as shaving the mustache of several of its members.
"The terrible human rights violations in Sweida are another grim reminder of the deadly consequences of the impunity of sectarian killings in Syria, which has emboldened the government and its allies to kill without fear of being held accountable," stated Diana Semaan, a representative of AI.
The bloodshed has led to a showdown between the Druze's top religious leader, Sheikh Hekmat al Hijri - who has garnered majority support among the various paramilitary factions created in Sweida - and the authorities in Damascus.
Access to the region remains controlled by the central government's troops, which restrict the passage of civilian vehicles and logistical assistance to the area, reinforcing the sense of siege observed among the Druze.
Empowered by military assistance from Israel, Al Hijri has opted for separatism, steering the crisis towards a dead end. On the 4th of this month, he once again demanded the right to "self-determination" for his community. "Our people have expressed their demand for an independent entity. We will not back down despite the sacrifices," he declared in a recorded message.
In the same recording, he explicitly thanked Netanyahu for the assistance received from Israel in what he described as his fight "against the tyranny of this terrorist government."
On the 16th of this month, Al Hijri's followers staged a large demonstration in the city of Sweida chanting "Sweida wants independence", where they also displayed Israeli flags.
For Sheikh Bassem Abu Fakhr, spokesperson for one of the main Druze armed factions, the Movement of Men of Dignity, the government's offensive in July has marked a turning point in relations with his community.
He himself acknowledges that until then, his group distanced itself from Al Hijri's inflexible position. "But the government has forced us to change our stance. Now we also want independence, although in any case, it will be the Israelis and Americans who decide whether there will be a Druze state or not," he openly states in a phone conversation.
Just when they thought those images were a thing of the past, Syria once again witnesses the presence of displaced people fleeing from yet another conflict. On August 19th, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that the displaced from both sides in Sweida amounted to about 184,000 people. The victims on both sides are reliving those grim testimonies heard during the civil war.
The 32 families sheltered in a school in Ghariyah al Gharbiyah, in Daraa, come from the mentioned region. Many come from the neighborhoods occupied by Bedouins in the city of Shahba, predominantly Druze. "They surrounded the neighborhoods and attacked us with mortars and all kinds of machine guns. They killed 45 people that day. The men managed to escape, but the women were kidnapped and held in a mosque," recalls Faes Gael Ali, 34 years old.
The displaced sit in the corridors of the school on mattresses, the same ones they use to sleep in the classrooms turned into rooms.
Shahba, a town of a few tens of thousands of inhabitants, where Druze, Bedouins, and Christians have lived intertwined for decades, is an example of the risk posed by aversion between communities.
"In Shabha, there are three neighborhoods where we Bedouins lived. Now they are empty, and the houses have been burned," adds Faes Gael.
Amal Ali, 33 years old, is one of the women who ended up held in a mosque in that town. "Both sides kidnapped. Some Druze neighbors wanted to help us, but they couldn't. They cried as they took us as prisoners. We were prisoners for eight days, and then they let us go," recalls the young woman, who could see from the temple's window how the flames consumed the suburbs where they lived.
The images and the distress evoked by the testimonies of the Bedouins from Shabha - the bodies in the streets, the chaos of the clashes, the indiscriminate attacks on civilians or fighters - mirror those heard from the Druze in Sweida who have settled in the Jaramana neighborhood, south of Damascus, a suburb where this community maintains a significant presence and influence.
According to Rabia Munder, spokesperson for the Druze of that suburb, 3,000 refugees from Sweida and "75 wounded" have arrived in Jaramana.
"I was in Sweida on two occasions after the ceasefire. The first time was on July 19th. The government people acted as if they were from Daesh [referring to the Islamic State]. There were bodies in the streets. Five of my cousins were killed," he recounts.
Munder has many years of opposition activism behind him. He was one of those who fought against the Assad dictatorship to achieve a democratic state. "We don't want to exchange one dictatorship for another," he adds.
The Druze who have escaped from Sweida have been distributed among families of the same faith. In the spacious residence of a local sheikh is Annuarte al Qassem, 44 years old. He shows the deep scars left on his wrists by the restraints with which he was held captive for ten days.
He says that a group of armed Bedouins kidnapped him from his own home in a village in Sweida, and clearly told him that they were doing it to "exchange him for one of their own who had been captured by the Druze."
Bedouins and forces loyal to Damascus have also been accused by human rights organizations of burning and looting dozens of Druze villages. These same groups warn that there is a significant number of people still missing.
Sheikh Bassem Abu Fakhr indicates that Bedouin paramilitaries "continue to occupy 34 Druze villages to this day and are holding 100 women hostage."
"Government mistakes are pushing the Druze towards Satan, which is Israel. It is a criminal state, but the Druze seek any kind of protection," concludes Rabia Munder.