Israeli forces wounded two people when they fired at a crowd in southern Syria, official media said on Tuesday, amid a new wave of civil resistance in the area.
There was no immediate Israeli reaction to the incident in the village of Jamla in the Yarmouk river basin, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Jordan.
Israel had disarmed the population and emptied weapon caches, but its forces still make regular incursions in a search of suspected hostile elements. In the past two weeks, residents have occasionally placed huge stones on the roads to impede advances, drawing Israeli fire.
On Monday, advancing Israeli forces in military vehicles fired at a crowd that had blocked a road to Jamla. The firing wounded a child and man, each in the foot, Syria's state news agency Sana reported.
The Israeli contingent, comprising six military vehicles, advanced towards Jamla and set up a checkpoint north of the village. “Residents blocked the road with stones in an attempt to halt the advance,” Sana said.
Footage on social media purportedly shows a crowd of mostly teenagers thronging the road, with military vehicles in the distance. The sound of gunfire can be heard, as some of the children take cover. “They are firing,” a man is heard saying.
Jamla sits next to a 1974 ceasefire line separating Syria from the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied from Syria in the 1967 war. The US is pushing for a peace deal between the two neighbours, which have technically remained at war for decades.
US presidential envoy Tom Barrack and Syria's President Ahmad Al Shara have held several meetings on the prospect of resuming talks between the bordering countries after several rounds of US-mediated discussions last year, regional sources say. Their last known meeting took place in Damascus on May 16.
One of the sources told The National that Syria had demanded from Mr Barrack that Israel stops its incursions into Syria and halts support for members of the Druze minority in the southern governorate of Sweida.
Many Druze in Sweida have opposed the new Islamist order in Damascus, having also mounted a civil disobedience campaign against former president Bashar Al Assad in the last two years of his rule, which ended in December 2024.
The source said recent incidents in the Yarmouk basin and in Quneitra governorate in the north, as well as tough rhetoric from Syrian officials against Israel, indicate that Mr Barrack is failing to make a breakthrough.
In 1973, Syria launched a war to regain the Golan Heights but achieved little in the way of restoring the area. The following year, Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state, oversaw a deal under which a UN-mandated buffer zone was established between the two sides, keeping Israel in control of the Golan and restricting the type of forces, and weapons, that Syria could deploy in the area.
Shortly after the downfall of Bashar Al Assad in December 2024, Israel advanced beyond the 1974 line and established a de facto security zone.
The zone spans parts of Deraa, Rural Damascus and Quneitra governorates. The Syrian side of the Yarmouk River basin is situated in Deraa governorate.
Last month, the Israeli army advanced into two villages near Jamla but were met by residents who pelted them with stones, forcing the troops to withdraw.
The Israeli army later shelled the outskirts of one of the villages, incinerating one house. Several hundred residents fled to the nearby countryside. Damascus deployed 150 security personnel into the basin to ensure only residents entered the area.
