Qatana, Syria – In the living room of his home, Ahmed explains in a low voice how he was beaten and tortured in an Israeli prison after he was arrested at a checkpoint the Israeli military had set up on the street in his village in Syria. They said, ‘You need to come with us for five minutes, and we’ll bring you back.'” He says he then spent more than one year detained in Israel. For 90 days, he was in handcuffs and describes being thrown to the cell floor, beaten with sticks while restrained with his hands behind his back.
Sometimes they leave them tightened like this for one or two days until your hands are extremely swollen. Your hands go green, and you can’t feel them at all.” After his release this month, dozens of people gathered outside his home to congratulate him on his return, and to seek any scrap of information about their own relatives who are still missing. Al Jazeera has ascertained that there are at least 51 Syrians still detained inside Israel.
Many were held in the notorious Sde Teiman military prison, but have since been transferred to facilities run by the Israel Prison Service. Al Jazeera has confirmed Syrians have been moved to Ofer, al-Jalama (Kishon) and Megiddo. A small number have been released.
Mahmoud – a pseudonym – had been home for nine days when Al Jazeera interviewed him. I feel crazy sometimes in the night. I go to look at my kids because I can’t believe I’m really home.” Mahmoud pauses as his six-year-old son carries in a tray of wobbling tea glasses and sets it carefully on the carpeted floor.
The glasses clink, and the window shakes. The children turn their heads towards the sound of artillery. Since early August, the Israeli military has fired shells into the fields most days, preventing farmers and shepherds from working, occasionally killing livestock and regularly terrifying the population.
In September, the Sijil Center, a Syrian organisation that monitors Israeli activity, documented 280 Israeli violations of the 1974 agreement between the two countries, including incursions, raids and arrests, as well as artillery and machine-gun fire. UN forces have patrolled a demilitarised zone between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria since the 1974 agreement, but Israel occupied more Syrian land in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December 2024. The peacekeepers remain, but have limited capacity to restrain Israeli military activity, which continues to increase.
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