Israel’s military has seized a strategic mountain top in its contested border area with Syria and advanced on positions beyond it, reshaping the frontier potentially for the long term.

Qaeda spin-off HTS will come in two flavours only. Either submit and collude like the West Bank, or end up wrecked like Gaza There has been a flurry of “What next for Syria?” articles in the wake of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s hurried exit from Syria and the takeover of much of the country by al-Qaeda’s rebranded local forces.

A Syrian security source said Israeli troops reached Qatana, which is six miles into Syrian territory east of a demilitarised zone separating Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria.

Fidan’s visit is part of Ankara’s efforts to increase its influence over the future of Syria and the HTS leadership, and to eliminate the Washington-backed Kurdish forces.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Tice's mother his country won't conduct airstrikes near a secret prison outside Damascus.

Assad’s fall to bomb all the Syrian military assets it wanted to keep out of the rebels’ hands – striking nearly 500 targets, destroying the navy, and taking out, it claims, 90% of Syria’s known surface-to-air missiles.

The buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights was created by the U.N. after the 1973 Mideast war. A

Israeli ships destroyed the Syrian military fleet Monday night in a campaign to eliminate strategic threats, the defence minister said.

Israel is celebrating the fall of Assad because it breaks the noose that Iran had been patiently tightening around Israel’s borders in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Tehran’s pincer is now broken and rendered useless. From the point of view of Israel’s wider conflict with the Islamic Republic, the collapse of Assad’s regime is a strategic victory.

Israel dropped a bomb on Syria so powerful it ... The Israeli military declined to comment on the strikes. The US embassy in Damascus advised Americans to leave Syria, saying the security ...

Israeli troops will remain in Syria slightly beyond a buffer zone -- created by the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement -- for "strategic reasons," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement Thursday.

The military’s expanded perch on the peak of Mount Hermon, straddling the so-called disengagement zone, gives Israel clear sightlines to the Syrian capital, Damascus, 25 miles away. Israeli ...