Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Militant Palestinian Group Vows To Take Back Golan

A militant Palestinian group in Damascus said it is forming combat units to try to recapture Israeli-occupied territory, in particular the Golan Heights, after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah that they would support such operations.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) said it was preparing for new operations after nearly 40 years of quiet on the Israel-Syria border.

The group, designated terrorists by the United States and others in the West, was most active in the 1970s and 80s but retains influence with Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon.

“The leadership of the PFLP-GC announces that it will form brigades to work on liberating all violated (Israeli-occupied) territories, first and foremost the occupied Golan,” it said in a statement late on Friday.

“The Popular Front’s leaders have opened the door to all Syrian citizens to volunteer in the formation of the resistance.”

Israel launched a series of air strikes around Damascus last week that inflamed regional tensions already on the rise as Syria’s two-year civil war slowly seeps across its increasingly chaotic and porous borders.

Intelligence sources said Israel was trying to take out “game-changing” Iranian weapons destined for Lebanon’s Shi’ite militant and political group Hezbollah.

Assad is a pivotal ally of regional Shi’ite power Iran, and is believed to serve as its arms conduit to Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon.

Assad and his father, who ruled for 30 years before him, maintained calm in the Golan despite an official state of war between the two countries and Syria’s support for militants in Lebanon and Gaza.

But following last week’s strikes, which shook the Syrian capital and set its skyline alight with flames, Assad was quoted by state media as saying he would turn the Golan into a “resistance front” and would allow combatants to attack Israel from the area.

Hezbollah, which fought a 34-day war with Israel in 2006 and is believed to coordinate with the PFLP-GC, turned up the rhetoric further by saying it would support any such operations.

“We announce that we stand with the Syrian popular resistance and offer material and spiritual support as well as coordination in order to liberate the Syrian Golan,” the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech on Thursday.

Nasrallah said Syria would defy Israeli strikes by sending his group sophisticated weaponry, which he hinted may change the balance of power in the region.

The regions bordering the Golan Heights have already collapsed into disarray, with daily battles between state forces and rebels fighting to topple four decades of Assad family rule.

The war, which has killed more than 70,000 people, risks becoming increasingly regionalised, as the country’s borders mark the faultlines of several Middle Eastern conflicts.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.