Over the course of September, Israel carried out no less than 280 separate incursions into southwest Syria, and they currently hold at least 49 Syrians in detention, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reports.
Those detained civilians who are ultimately released by the IDF reported instances of torture, including beatings, prolonged standing in stress positions and threats against the detainees’ families. Notably, none of these detainees appear to have ever been charged with anything.
It has become increasingly routine for Israel to both release detainees with no explanation and to disappear additional Syrian civilians into detention. Some of those detainees are released in a matter of hours, others can be held a year or even longer. September was the highest number of incursions of any single month this year.
IDF troops enter Quneitra Governorate | image from SOHR
Locals from the southwest are in Damascus this weekend to protest outside the Syrian Foreign Ministry, trying to pressure the Syrian government to find out the fate of those detainees who have yet to be returned.
Whether the Syrian government can do that remains to be seen, as the IDF is remarkably opaque about these operations, and rarely mentions the detentions at all in official statements, and there appears to be no legal underpinning for their being held.
Multiple new Israeli military incursions into Syria were reported again today, in both Quneitra and Daraa Governorates. The largest of these incursions was in the Yarmouk River Basin, in Daraa, where troops chased farmers off of their land and prevented others from leaving the villages to work on the farms.
No detentions were reported on Sunday, but similarly no releases happened either, which leaves the number of Syrians held by the IDF once again at 49.
