U.S. Shuttles Between Israel and Islamist-Led Syria in Paris to Redraw Golan Border Rules

Behind closed doors in a 19th century stone building off the Quai d’Orsay, American diplomats on Tuesday shuttled between two delegations that still refuse to sit in the same room: Israeli officials representing a government with troops dug into southwestern Syria, and envoys from an Islamist-led Syria whose president once commanded al-Qaida’s franchise in the country.

Their task in Paris is narrow on paper — to agree on where Israeli soldiers can stand, and what weapons Syria can field, along a stretch of frontier below the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. In practice, diplomats say, they are trying to rewrite the rules that have governed one of the Middle East’s quietest but most volatile fault lines for half a century.

The indirect talks, mediated by the United States and hosted by France, are the fifth round of security negotiations between Israel and post-Assad Syria and the first since the process broke down in October. The agenda centers on the future of Israeli positions inside Syrian territory seized in late 2024, the shape of new demilitarized zones, and the role of U.N. peacekeepers along a front defined since 1974 by an aging disengagement agreement.

Who is at the table — and who isn’t

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot is hosting the discussions, while U.S. Middle East envoy Tom Barrack moves between the two delegations, according to Western and regional diplomats. On the Syrian side, Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani and intelligence chief Hussein al-Salameh are leading the team. Israel’s delegation is headed by Yechiel Leiter, its ambassador to Washington, joined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military adviser, Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman.

Diplomats describe the Paris round as an attempt to revive a process that stalled three months ago over deep disagreements on maps and mandates. The talks were pushed back on track after a Dec. 29 meeting in Florida between Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump, who has made containing Iran and stabilizing Israel’s northern border central to his second-term Middle East agenda.

The land at the center of the dispute

At issue are several hundred square kilometers of Syrian land that Israeli forces entered on Dec. 8, 2024, the day Bashar Assad’s government collapsed and rebel forces swept into Damascus. Advancing from the Golan Heights, Israeli troops moved into the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force buffer zone and then beyond, seizing the ruined city of Quneitra, several nearby towns, the Syrian-held slopes of Mount Hermon and strategic infrastructure including the al-Wehda Dam.

Israel said at the time that the 1974 disengagement accord creating the U.N. buffer zone had effectively “collapsed” with the fall of the Syrian state and the spread of armed factions. Officials in Jerusalem framed the incursion as a defensive step to fill a security vacuum, protect the Druze minority in southern Syria and block what they described as Iranian efforts to move weapons and fighters closer to the Israeli frontier.

The United Nations took a different view. The secretary-general’s spokesman said Israeli troops operating inside the U.N. zone were in violation of the 1974 agreement, which requires both sides to keep military forces out of the demilitarized strip and to respect tight limits on troops and heavy weapons in nearby areas. The head of UNDOF, the peacekeeping mission tasked with supervising the deal, formally warned Israel that its deployments breached the accord.

Under international law, the Golan Heights themselves are widely regarded as occupied Syrian territory, despite Israel’s 1981 annexation and U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty there in 2019. The new Israeli presence farther east and north, in land that even Israel has not claimed to annex, has opened an additional legal and diplomatic front.

Syria’s demand: pull back to pre-incursion lines

Syria’s new rulers say the Paris talks must start from that point. A Syrian official involved in the negotiations said Damascus is demanding a complete pullback to the positions held by both sides on Dec. 7, 2024, the day before the Israeli incursion.

“We are not going to legitimize an Israeli presence in Syria or the Golan Heights for that matter,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks.

Syrian state media and officials have described the process as aimed at a “reciprocal security agreement” that restores what they call full Syrian sovereignty and bars all external interference on its territory. In messages to Washington over the past year, President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government has pledged that “we will not allow Syria to become a source of threat to any party, including Israel,” while rejecting any recognition of Israel’s control over the Golan.

Israel’s red lines: demilitarization and depth

Israel has been less explicit about its red lines. Officials have said any arrangement must safeguard northern communities that have endured years of rocket fire from Lebanese Hezbollah and other Iran-aligned groups. Netanyahu has floated the idea of a demilitarized belt running “from near Damascus to Mount Hermon,” and Israeli negotiators are pressing for binding limits on Syrian forces and heavy weapons across a wide swath of southwestern Syria, according to people briefed on the talks.

Israeli officials have not publicly committed to a full withdrawal from all territory taken in 2024, and diplomats say Jerusalem is seeking some form of continuing buffer — whether held by its own forces, monitored by the United Nations or both — even if lines are adjusted.

“The security dimension is the first and last priority,” said one Israeli official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “Any agreement has to ensure that what fills the vacuum on the other side is not Iran or organizations that threaten our citizens.”

An unusual counterpart for Israel

Complicating those calculations is the identity of Israel’s counterpart. Unlike previous rounds of Syrian-Israeli diplomacy in the 1990s and early 2000s, when negotiators dealt with the secular Baathist regime of Hafez and then Bashar Assad, the current talks are indirectly engaging an Islamist-led government whose core leadership emerged from the ranks of al-Qaida’s former Syrian affiliate.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known for years as Abu Mohammed al-Julani, headed the Nusra Front and later Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, hard-line Islamist groups that fought Assad and were once designated terrorist organizations by the United States. When rebels captured Damascus in December 2024, Sharaa became the country’s de facto leader and was formally appointed transitional president the following month under an interim constitution that set out a five-year transition.

Since then, his government has tried to recast him as a pragmatic Islamist head of state. Sharaa has announced the dissolution of old regime security structures and rebel factions, pledged protections for minorities, and promised to drive out Iranian-backed militias he now calls “foreign occupiers.” In July 2025, the United States revoked its terrorist designation of his former group, citing steps toward political moderation and cooperation on counterterrorism.

Yet the legacy of Syria’s long war is never far from the surface. Assad loyalist cells remain active in parts of the country. Sectarian attacks against Alawites and other minorities have been documented in western Syria. The Syrian Democratic Forces, dominated by Kurdish fighters in the northeast, have clashed repeatedly with Sharaa’s troops despite a formal agreement to integrate commands. Iran-linked militias, though under pressure, continue to operate in pockets of the country.

Analysts say those internal dynamics shape Sharaa’s room for maneuver. Entering U.S.-mediated talks that could lead to new restrictions on Syrian deployments near Israel risks a backlash from hard-line Islamist and nationalist factions that still view Israel as an implacable enemy and the Golan as non-negotiable occupied land. At the same time, successfully negotiating an Israeli withdrawal from the newly seized areas would be a powerful symbol of restored sovereignty that could bolster his standing at home.

Pressures on both sides

Israel faces its own constraints. The Israel Defense Forces, already stretched by years of operations against Hezbollah, Iranian targets in Syria and Palestinian armed groups, now must manage an additional front inside Syrian territory. Holding a forward “security belt” can provide tactical depth but also exposes troops to ambushes, roadside bombs and international criticism familiar from Israel’s 18-year presence in southern Lebanon.

“The dilemma is whether staying there indefinitely really prevents the next war, or simply creates conditions for a different kind of conflict,” said a former senior Israeli defense official, now retired, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of ongoing operations.

For Washington and Paris, the stakes reach beyond the geography of the Golan. U.S. officials have framed the talks as part of a broader effort to prevent Syria from reverting to a battleground for Iran and to lock in understandings that reduce the risk of a multi-front confrontation involving Lebanon, Syria and possibly Iraq. A more stable southern Syria, they argue, could also make it easier to channel reconstruction aid and expand economic ties with Damascus under conditions acceptable to Western legislatures.

The United Nations is watching closely. UNDOF’s mandate, renewed most recently until the end of 2025, was designed for a world in which two conventional armies faced each other across a largely static line. Any new arrangement will likely require adjustments to where peacekeepers patrol, what they monitor and how they report violations to the Security Council.

What it means on the ground

For residents along the frontier, those institutional questions translate into basic concerns about safety and survival. In the Syrian provinces of Quneitra, Daraa and Sweida, civilians have endured Israeli airstrikes on Syrian and Iranian-linked targets, clashes between local militias and government forces, and the day-to-day insecurity of life in a contested zone. Druze communities, in particular, have found themselves reliant on Israeli support in some areas while fearful of the Islamist elements within Syria’s new order.

On the Israeli side, towns and villages on the Golan and in the Galilee remain within range of rockets and artillery that could be fired from either Lebanon or Syria if hostilities resume. Residents there have lived for years with periodic air-raid sirens and the sight of smoke rising from across the border as Israel struck what it described as weapons depots or militia positions.

Whether the Paris talks can change that reality is far from clear. Diplomats caution that the gaps between the sides remain wide, especially on the questions of full Israeli withdrawal and how to define and police demilitarized areas. Both governments are wary of appearing to make concessions under pressure, and both face potential spoilers in the form of armed groups that may try to disrupt any emerging arrangement.

Still, officials involved in the process note that Israel and Syria, despite the absence of a peace treaty and the trauma of past wars, have lived for decades with a mostly quiet front governed by the 1974 disengagement accord. The fact that both now say they want to update rather than abandon that framework is seen in Paris, Washington and at U.N. headquarters as a sign that, for all the mistrust, they share an interest in avoiding open conflict.

As Barrack continues his shuttle between meeting rooms overlooking the Seine, the language being debated is dry: zones of separation, limitations of armaments, guarantees of non-aggression. Behind those clauses lies a larger question that neither side is ready to address directly — whether a narrow security deal over a strip of land below the Golan can hold in place a fragile new order in Syria, or whether it is only a temporary pause before the next round of upheaval on a frontier that has been redrawn more than once in living memory.