Why is Israel Escalating its Strikes Against Syria?

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 was a once-in-a-generation chance for Israel to reset its troubled relationship with Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apparently felt the same way: on 11 December, he lauded the end of the Assad regime and stated that Israel ‘has no interest in a conflict’ with the new government in Damascus.

Yet Israel’s actions did not match Netanyahu’s words. Israeli troops quickly occupied 460 square kilometres of Syrian territory. Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, repeatedly clarified that his government does not seek conflict with Israel. Yet Israel has not let up: its strikes on Syria in late April 2025 were the heaviest since the Assad regime fell.

What explains Israel’s policies? This is the case of ‘something old and something new.’ Israel has long suffered from a ‘Syria syndrome’: a heuristic that causes it to interpret all of Damascus’ actions through a deeply pessimistic prism. But this is far from the whole story.

More importantly, the ‘something new’ is that the October 7 attacks engendered a fundamental shift in Israeli grand strategy. Previously, Israel was a status quo power. It might not have liked the regimes in Damascus, Gaza and elsewhere, but it tolerated them. Today, Israel is a revisionist actor that employs military force and territorial conquest to alter the regional balance of power in its favour. This is exceptionally strategically unsound in Syria, in that Israel is provoking a conflict where one does not currently exist.

Debunking Israel’s Justifications

Whilst the rebel offensive that preceded Assad’s flight unfolded at a bewildering pace, Israel responded so quickly that it is hard to believe it did not have a premeditated contingency plan for exactly this scenario. Less than 24 hours after the regime fell, Israeli troops crossed over from the Golan Heights – a mountainous territory that Israel had captured in the ‘Six Day War’ of June 1967 – and seized the now-defunct Syrian army’s fortifications across the border. Meanwhile, in just ten days, Israel’s air force struck over 600 targets throughout Syria.

Israel’s explanations for these actions are at best contradictory and at worst deliberate obfuscations. Israeli officials initially claimed this new occupation would be short-term. But Israel’s military has slowly crept eastwards and now sits at least 12 kilometres deeper inside Syria than it did before the regime fell. Israel has built nine outposts, paved roads, laid minefields and is allegedly partnering with private companies to offer tours of the region. None of these actions suggest that Israel plans to leave any time soon.

Equally implausible is Netanyahu’s claim that Israel’s operations seek to protect ‘our Druze brothers’ in Syria. From 2011 to 2024, hundreds of Druze died in the Syrian Civil War, yet Israel did little to prevent this. Equally, the sectarian violence in late April and early May 2025 ended not after Israeli intervention, but after Druze groups reached a ceasefire agreement with Syria’s central government. Despite the agreement, though, Israel continued to bomb targets in Syria, suggesting little concern for or coordination with the country’s major Druze factions.

Inside Israel, there exists a real sense of solidarity with the country’s Druze; indeed, Israel’s Druze citizens are over-represented in its security forces. Syria’s Druze population, by contrast, is a diverse patchwork of leaders and militia groups with divergent interests. Yet they agree on one thing. Aside from a handful of militias with links to the former Assad regime, all of Syria’s main Druze leaders, militias and interest groups have condemned Israel’s recent actions.

Something Old, Something New

If Israel’s official justifications for its actions lack credibility, what then explains its aggressive actions in Syria today? In 1976, a journalist interviewed the Israeli soldier and statesman, Moshe Dayan. His response to one question stood out for its candour. In the 1960s, Israel and Syria fought ‘the game of inches;’ a series of violent border skirmishes. Israel blamed Syria for each incident. Dayan, by contrast, belatedly admitted that ‘at least 80%’ of the clashes were Israeli provocations to induce a war with Syria. Observers have longed noted a ‘Syria Syndrome’ where Israel’s public and elites share a vision – or an obsession – of Damascus as a malevolent bogeyman.

But ‘Syria Syndrome’ alone does not explain Israel’s policies today. Syria is not the Israeli enfant terrible that it once was. That role has been usurped by Iran. During the later stages of the Syrian Civil war, the then-weakened Assad regime let Iran increasingly use Syrian territory to supply Hezbollah. Though Israel responded by striking the convoys, Jerusalem regularly forewarned Damascus to minimize any blowback. Netanyahu even allegedly pressed the US to moderate its sanctions against the Assad regime in the expectation that, in return, Syria would reign in Iran’s smuggling networks.

These facts may be surprising given Jerusalem’s deep-seated suspicions of Syria’s intent, but when framed through a broader lens, they conform to a long-term Israeli grand strategy. Israel under Netanyahu was historically a status quo actor that sought to perpetuate the regional balance of power. Israel adopted a ‘better the devil you know’ approach, tacitly collaborating with supposedly hostile governments in Gaza, Beirut and Damascus alike. Yet whilst Israel was open to clandestine bargaining, it ardently resisted any proposed significant political changes. This corresponded with the prevailing attitude in Israel’s political mainstream that a ‘wait and see’ approach was preferable to taking risks through territorial concessions.

But Hamas’s murderous attacks on October 7 invalidated Israel’s grand strategy and the assumptions underpinning it. Previously, Israel used its military edge to ‘mow the grass’: escalating violence when necessary to trim any revisionist threat down to size. In a post-October 7 era, Israel employs military force to advance a different political end: altering the regional distribution of power to better favour Jerusalem’s interests. This new approach manifested as regime change in Gaza, a counterinsurgency campaign in the West Bank and the aggressive targeting of Iranian assets throughout the region. In short: Israel is now a revisionist power.

Alongside regime change within its neighbours, a second component of Israel’s desired end-state is achieving strategic depth. For many Israelis, their country’s borders are not a source of security, but an existential threat. These ‘Auschwitz Borders’ – in the words of Israeli statesman, Abba Eban – supposedly confine Israel to a territory that it is near-impossible to defend. Strategic depth advocates a simple solution: that Israel takes more territory, creating a buffer zone to push conflict away from its heartlands. This explains why Israel still occupies parts of Gaza and Lebanon today. Strategic depth is a long-standing concept in Israel’s security policy. But in recent years, it has played second fiddle to Jerusalem’s advocacy of the status quo. By contrast, it is a natural bedfellow to a force-centric revisionist grand strategy, giving Israel the tools to induce change and the vision for what it wants to achieve.

Seeing Everything as a Nail

It is this combination of strategic depth, grand strategic revisionism and a belief that anything Syria’s leaders do or say is malign that drives Israel’s actions there today. It explains why Israel’s post-December 2024 occupation of Syria has crept eastward; this mimics its actions during ‘the game of inches’ in the 1950s and 1960s. Dayan claimed that Israel would deliberately send its personnel deeper and deeper into contested territory ‘until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot.’ This, in turn, would elicit a disproportionate Israeli response. He could well have been describing Israel’s recent actions in Syria. Israel’s persistent and escalating attacks – most notably the April 2025 strikes on targets adjacent to al-Shara’s presidential palace – look less preventative and more like an increasingly brazen attempt to goad Syria into a war.

Alongside these old prejudices, Israel’s apparent goals – inducing a conflict in Syria – are far more ambitious than anything it attempted during the over fifty years of the Assad dynasty’s rule. Rather than see the end of Assad’s brutal regime as an opportunity, Israel perceives it as a threat and is responding as it often does when it feels insecure: through military force and territorial conquest. In this sense, it is behaving like a traumatized state that is acting out. The October 7 attacks were a colossal intelligence failure. Similarly, Israel’s intelligence agencies failed to predict the Assad regime’s collapse. It is therefore unsurprising that Israel is importing its traumas to Syria today.

This produces an escalatory dynamic that is destructive and dangerous for Israel and Syria alike. Since 1967, Israel has invoked its perceived need for strategic depth to justify holding onto the Golan. Yet today, Jerusalem claims its creeping occupation of more Syrian territory is necessary to protect its settlers in the Golan. Netanyahu has demanded that Syria’s government demilitarize all its territory, south of and up to Damascus. Thus, Israel is now demanding a buffer zone (demilitarization), to protect its buffer zone (its new occupation of Syria), to defend its buffer zone (the Golan).

Israel’s actions illustrate that when you are traumatized and have a hammer, you see every problem as a nail. Israel’s post-October 7 trauma is blinding it to the reality that its policies there are undermining its grand strategic goal of rolling back hostile actors across the region. Around 70% of Hezbollah’s weapons are Russian made. Absurdly, Israel is now lobbying the US to let Russia keep this base. As in the past, perpetuating Russia’s presence in Syria would hinder Israel’s operational freedom. This would also allow Iran to resuscitate a smuggling route that would, in turn, allow Hezbollah to regroup in Lebanon.

This is welcome news for Iran, which is already weaponizing Israel’s strikes and occupation to further its own ends in Syria. The ‘Islamic Resistance Front,’ a new anti-government militia in southern Syria, has regularly attacked Israeli troops there to galvanize local support. This is a tried-and-tested Iranian strategy. It was Israel’s prolonged occupation of southern Lebanon that gave Hezbollah, with Iranian support, the legitimacy and ability to entrench itself within that country. In sum: a weak Syrian government would further allow Iran to re-establish its long-standing networks in that country. Yet Israel is working tirelessly to deliver exactly this scenario.

Most ominously, Israel is making conflict with the Syrian government’s primary external patron – Turkey – more likely. One explanation is Israel’s belief that a Turkish proxy on its border would be just as undesirable as an Iranian one. Yet here, too, Israel’s actions are self-defeating in that Syria’s new government is increasingly leaning on Turkey to protect it from Israel. Turkey has already proposed basing its own fighter jets in Syria to deter Israeli encroachment. Ankara has reportedly now gone further and suggested that Damascus permit it to set up air defence systems at Tiyas airbase in central Syria. This is not unwarranted, given that Israel attacked the base in March 2025.

Israel’s Self-Defeating Strategy

That Israel’s envisioned end-state in Syria is shared by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah and is putting it on a collision course with Turkey should give Jerusalem pause for thought. Equally, Syria is neither the Gaza Strip, nor Lebanon. The October 7 attacks and Hezbollah’s daily rocket fire into Israel gave it at the very least a causus belli in these territories. There exists no such justification for Israel’s actions in Syria today.

Though Israel might believe that war with Syria is inevitable, it is the only one of these two actors doing the fighting so far. Most Islamists won’t even say ‘Israel.’ By contrast, al-Sharaa not only referenced Israel, but publicly made clear that his new administration had no hostile intentions toward it. The new administration has launched no attacks against Israel. Damascus has not responded to any Israeli strike, including when these attacks killed members of the government’s own security forces.

It is, by contrast, Israel’s claims that it wants peace that look increasingly hollow. The Israel-Syria border could constitute a welcome contrast from the security headaches that Jerusalem faces elsewhere. Israel and the new Syrian government share overlapping interests in rolling back Iran, Russia and Hezbollah’s influence. Instead of recognizing this, Israel’s actions are playing into its adversaries’ hands. They are the product of Jerusalem’s own inability to see past its long-standing path dependencies and beliefs and its new revisionist regional goals.

In early April, Israel’s strikes abated after Jerusalem and Ankara held ‘deconfliction’ talks. But the quiet lasted less than a month, until Israel employed the internecine violence between Syria’s Druze and Sunnis as a pretext to return to its revisionist strategy. Today, the status quo remains febrile.

Given the plethora of external actors with interests in Syria today, any violence is unlikely to remain local. The worst-case scenario would be conflict between Turkey and Israel. This may sound far-fetched, but the last time Israel launched a sustained campaign of provocations against Syria, it started an escalation spiral that ended in the ‘Six Day War.’ Netanyahu may be betting that it can induce a similar transformative event that reshapes the regional balance of power in its favour yet again. This is a gamble that Syria, Israel and the region cannot afford.

© Robert Geist Pinfold, 2025, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

For terms of use, see Website Terms and Conditions of Use.

Have an idea for a Commentary you'd like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we'll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. View full guidelines for contributors.