Syria, Israel hold US-mediated talks to de-escalate after Israeli strikes

Syria's foreign minister sat down across from Israel's intelligence chief in a hotel in Jordan on Sunday, the two sides separated by years of mistrust and weeks of fresh violence. The meeting, brokered by the United States, was meant to cool a conflict that has been heating up since the fall of Bashar al-Assad last December—a moment that upended the region's balance and left Syria vulnerable to the very powers now trying to negotiate its future.

Asaad al-Shaibani came to the table with a specific list of grievances. Israel had launched hundreds of strikes on Syrian territory since al-Assad's collapse, and just days before this meeting, warplanes had hit the Abu Duhur airbase in northwestern Syria, claiming the target was to block Turkish troops from using the facility. Syria and Turkey both denied the charge. The broader picture was grimmer: Israeli forces had moved into a demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights that had been neutral ground for fifty years, and they were showing no sign of leaving. For Damascus, the immediate ask was simple—Israeli withdrawal to positions held before December 2024, and a full restoration of the 1974 disengagement agreement that had kept the two sides apart.

But Israel came with its own demands, and they were not small. According to reporting from Israeli media, the delegation led by Mossad chief Roman Gofman had drawn a series of red lines: Turkey's military presence in Syria had to be contained; the Syrian side of the Golan Heights must remain demilitarized; the Druze community in the region needed protection; and Syria could not acquire certain strategic weapons. Any Israeli withdrawal, they made clear, would be conditional on what they called "diplomatic achievements"—a phrase that left room for interpretation and leverage.

The talks themselves focused on what both sides called "practical mechanisms" to stop the strikes and targeting operations, and on reviving a security agreement that had been frozen since February, when the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran. Earlier in the year, according to al-Shaibani, the two sides had actually agreed on paper to "almost everything"—security zones in southern Syria, a buffer where only UN forces would operate. But those agreements had not held. The foreign minister stressed to the Israeli delegation that Syria was a sovereign state with the right to rebuild its army and choose its own alliances. He rejected any arrangement that would strip Damascus of those rights.

Underlying all of this was a deeper anxiety. Syria feared becoming a proxy battlefield between Israel and Turkey, two regional powers with their own rivalry and their own interests in Syrian territory. Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Erdogan had been trading sharp words since the Abu Duhur strike, and Damascus worried that if the two powers came into direct conflict on Syrian soil, the country's fragile new government would be caught in the middle. Hassan Mneimneh, a political analyst at the Middle East Institute, was skeptical that these talks would actually reduce tensions. He suggested that Israel, seeing Syria's willingness to negotiate, would likely use that opening to demand more, not less. "Now that Syria has indicated its desire to have the situation de-escalate, Israel is likely to bring in more demands," he said. From Syria's perspective, the talks were less about achieving peace and more about preventing the country from tearing itself apart—about keeping Turkish and Israeli interests from consuming what remained of Syrian sovereignty and allowing the new government, barely eight months old, to consolidate power and begin the work of rebuilding.