One year after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s government, Syrians flooded the streets of a battered nation to mark what has now come to be called Liberation Day.
The newly renamed Umayyad Square in Damascus pulsed with chants and fireworks, while in Hama, crowds waved Syria’s new flag—marking the day hardline Islamist militants from Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham/HTS wrested control of the city.
Defacto leader and former HTS chief, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, who took power after Assad fled to Russia in December 2024, addressed the nation from the Umayyad Mosque, calling the transition “a triumph of dignity over despotism.”
Yet even as fireworks lit up the capital, the echo of foreign warplanes in the south signaled a more complicated reality—one in which Syria’s sovereignty remains contested by Israeli military power and unresolved internal fragmentation.
The renewed aggression from Israel has blurred the lines between post-war celebration and continued occupation. On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israeli forces would remain in a so-called “buffer zone” inside southern Syria—an occupation framed, once again, as a matter of security.
His remarks followed tepid Syrian accusations regarding Tel Aviv's exploitation of regional disarray, launching over 1,000 air raids and 400 incursions into Syrian territory since the collapse of Damascus’s central command.
This is not an isolated front. In Gaza, Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir declared that the “yellow line”—a demarcation of zones occupied by Israel during its ground invasion, and sanctioned by Trump's peace plan—would now serve as the permanent border.
The announcement shattered what little momentum remained in the Gaza peace plan backed by US President Donald Trump, whose second-phase proposal included an international 'enforcement' force, and a new governing body excluding Hamas.
That vision now lies in ruins, buried under Israel’s expanding control of 53% of the strip—including fertile agricultural zones and densely populated cities.
Back in Syria, the destabilization is multilayered. Netanyahu previously demanded a demilitarized zone stretching from Damascus to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Al-Sharaa countered the demand at the Doha Forum 2025, asserting, “Only the Syrian army can protect our land.”
The forum, under the banner “From Promises to Justice,” provided the Syrian president a platform to denounce what he framed as yet another foreign imposition cloaked in the language of peacekeeping.
“Syria insists that Israel adhere to the 1974 Disengagement Agreement,” Al-Sharaa said, referencing the accord that followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The deal had defined separation lines and placed a UN force in a demilitarized zone—a structure now effectively dismantled by Israel’s unilateral actions.
In the immediate aftermath of Assad’s departure, Israeli forces declared the agreement void and surged into southern Syria, seizing strategic positions near Mount Hermon under the pretext of countering militias. The airstrike on Beit Jinn, one of the deadliest since the regime's fall, drew condemnation from Damascus as a “war crime.”
The dual collapse of internal dictatorship and external guarantees has left Syrians caught between unresolved trauma and new territorial threats. Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani echoed this at the Doha Forum, insisting that talks with Israel would be difficult without a full withdrawal from territory seized after December 8, 2024. He accused Israel not only of land theft, but of deliberately fueling sectarianism within Syria’s already fragmented society.
Meanwhile, the international response is fragmenting along familiar geopolitical lines. Last week, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution demanding Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied Golan Heights, annexed in 1981. The vote was clear—123 in favor, seven against, including Israel and the United States. Yet even as international law is reaffirmed, enforcement remains elusive.
The Gaza front mirrors the same imbalance. Despite Hamas’s return of one Thai captive’s body, negotiations remain frozen. One body—of Israeli police officer Ran Gvili—remains unrecovered.
Netanyahu has vowed Israel will retain “sovereign power of security” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Calls from Egypt and Qatar for Israeli withdrawal and international stabilization forces have been ignored.
Within Syria, the past continues to cast a long shadow. The National Committee for the Missing, formed under Al-Sharaa’s government in May, has yet to provide answers for an estimated 150,000 forcibly disappeared Syrians.
The few who emerged from Saydnaya prison—a facility Amnesty International called a “human slaughterhouse”—only confirm the horror. Located north of Damascus and run by military police, the prison remains outside judicial oversight, its walls still concealing decades of industrial-scale executions.
The 2017 Amnesty report revealed that thousands were hanged in Saydnaya in absolute secrecy, far from even the pretense of due process. The prison’s 1.4-square-kilometer compound remains a jurisdictional black hole, immune from reform.
Efforts to document this dark history are under strain. Although the National Committee aims to launch a digital database in 2026, six rights groups told Reuters that it has sidelined experienced exile-run networks and monopolized access to critical documents, stalling truth-seeking and leaving families adrift. In November, the committee warned relatives against trusting unofficial records circulated online.
Amid the ongoing occupation and memory of mass disappearance, the fragile hope of reconstruction leans heavily on returnees. Central Bank Governor Abdul Qadir Al-Hasryia told the Reuters that 1.5 million Syrians have come back, fueling a tentative economic revival. But trauma remains etched in the national psyche.
The fall of Assad, long demanded by foreign powers and internal dissidents alike, was supposed to herald justice. Instead, it has exposed a vacuum—filled not with sovereignty, but with foreign airstrikes, armed factions, and contested borders. Across Syria and Gaza, the vocabulary of freedom now competes with the architecture of occupation.
