Syrian interim president Ahmad Al-Sharaa expressed on Monday, on the sidelines of his visit to New York for the United Nations General Assembly meetings, his hope of reaching a security agreement that would ease tensions with Israel. However, he ruled out his country joining the “Abraham Accords” peace agreements with the Jewish state anytime soon.
اضافة اعلان
Al-Sharaa, a former jihadist leader whose forces ousted President Bashar al-Assad last December, had met with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
He is set to deliver the first speech by a Syrian president at the General Assembly in decades.
A spokesperson for Secretary Rubio said in a statement that during his meeting with Al-Sharaa, Rubio discussed the situation between Syria and Israel, stressing the need to seize the opportunity to “build a stable and sovereign state” in Syria.
Syrian officials have set a goal of concluding military and security agreements by the end of the year with Israel, which has carried out repeated attacks on Syrian territory amid the chaos since Assad’s fall.
During a meeting at a New York hotel on the sidelines of the UN summit, Al-Sharaa indicated that his country might be willing to discuss the issue of the occupied Golan Heights with Israel if the latter commits to de-escalation. He confirmed at the same time that negotiations aimed at reaching a security agreement with Israel had reached “advanced stages.”
“I hope this process will culminate in an agreement that preserves Syria’s sovereignty and addresses some of Israel’s existing security concerns,” he said.
But Al-Sharaa adopted a cautious stance when asked whether Syria would join the so-called “Abraham Accords,” under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel in 2020.
“There is a big difference between Syria and the countries that went into the Abraham Accords,” he said, noting that “Israel still occupies the Golan,” while those countries “do not share a border with Israel.”
He pointed out that since Assad’s overthrow, Israel has carried out “nearly a thousand airstrikes that destroyed many Syrian institutions,” along with “around 400 ground incursions” into Syrian territory.
Israel occupied the Golan Heights in the 1967 war and annexed it in 1981, a move not recognized by the international community.
Following Assad’s ouster, Israeli forces advanced into positions within the buffer zone established under the 1974 disengagement agreement.
Israel has launched hundreds of strikes on Syrian military sites, saying its aim was to prevent the new authorities from seizing the former army’s arsenal. It has repeatedly announced ground operations and the arrest of individuals it suspected of engaging in “terrorist” activity in southern Syria.
Israel demands that southern Syria become a demilitarized zone.
Syria and Israel remain officially at war, but they began direct negotiations after Assad’s fall, and representatives from both sides have met several times in recent months.
Al-Sharaa expressed skepticism about Israel’s intentions, questioning whether the state seeks to expand its influence in his country, and accusing it of violating peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan.
“We must take into account that the Arab and Islamic street is currently very angry about what is happening in Gaza,” he said, pointing out that “the whole world is witnessing scenes of starvation and killing.” These, he added, are all factors affecting public sentiment, “because at the end of the day, we are a government that emerged from a revolution, and we must reflect the voice of the people.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah had opened the door to the possibility of peace with Lebanon and Syria.
Since assuming power, Ahmad Al-Sharaa has traded his fighter’s garb for the attire of a head of state, meeting with foreign leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump last May in Saudi Arabia. Trump announced the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Damascus.
—AFP
