In the 19th century, Hasan Saadeddin’s clan left what is now Jordan after a tribal feud and settled in the Golan Heights.
The clan became owners of land close to Jabata Al Khashab in Syria's Quneitra province, near the high ground that Israel occupied in 1967.
For nearly three decades, Mr Saadeddin farmed the quarter-hectare he owns in peace. With plentiful rain and rich soil on the strategic plateau, his trees produced prized olives, cherries and plums. A 1974 armistice ensured calm in the area – until the 2011 to 2024 Syrian civil war.
His life came crashing down in April 2024, when Israeli forces arrested his son Saddam, then 16, during an incursion across the armistice line. “Saddam was not a threat to anyone. I haven’t heard from him. He is now almost 19,” Mr Saadeddin said.
They bulldozed and torched my land
Hasan Saadeddin, Syrian farmer
By the end of 2024, his land had disappeared behind a new Israeli military line, a result of the upheavals in Syria and the wider Middle East.
The area is a focal point of US-sponsored talks between Israel and Syria on security arrangements and eventual peace. The last known discussion was held in Jordan's capital, Amman, in August, but the talks have been inconclusive, with Syria demanding that Israeli forces return to the armistice line.
Instead, Israel has begun creating a new military line beyond the Golan highlands that it occupied in the 1967 war and annexed in 1981.
“They bulldozed and torched my land,” Mr Saadeddin said, pointing to a row of trees behind an earth barrier that forms part of the new line, known as Sufa 53, named after an Israeli brigade.
Syrian authorities said last week that Israel was extending the line south towards the Yarmouk River basin, near the border with Jordan. Israel has not officially acknowledged the existence of Sufa 53.
“It is not a continuous line yet,” an official in Quneitra said. He said Israel had built seven military outposts in newly occupied Syrian territory as a precursor to the line – six in Quneitra and one in Deraa.
One outpost is clearly visible across a wooded area near Jabata Al Khashab. Israeli patrols enter the village almost daily, according to residents, looking for weapons and questioning passers-by.
Mr Saadeddin is not the only farmer along the frontier to be affected by Israel's new military line. Agricultural engineer Asia Al Ali, who works with the Quneitra governorate, said Israel had taken over 1,160 hectares of farmland and wooded areas near Jabata Al Khashab and other parts of the frontier.
Israel destroyed 40 per cent of those areas in its drive to build the Sufa 53 line, she said. Around 250 farmers can no longer access their land, or it was made unusable.
“There has been a lot of [Israeli] escalation lately, and sometimes direct shooting,” said Ms Al Ali, adding that Israeli troops began spraying “poisonous material” this year to kill crops.
Israel began building the line in 2022, near the Syrian town of Hader in northern Quneitra, after the Syrian side of the frontier fell under Iranian influence.
Members of the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, defending the Assad regime in Syria, operated in the region and formed loyalist militias. Israeli positions came under rocket fire. Israel responded with air strikes and incursions.
The dynamics changed sharply after militant forces led by current Syrian President Ahmad Al Shara ousted Bashar Al Assad's government in December 2024. In the following weeks, Israel sent troops across the frontier and mounted an air campaign that destroyed large amounts of Syrian military hardware, without targeting members of the new order.
The US, which emerged as the most powerful backer of the new government, initiated talks between Syria and Israel to reach security arrangements and an eventual peace deal.
On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had phoned Mr Al Shara in July last year, after Israeli planes bombed government and military targets in central Damascus and near the presidential palace.
Mr Netanyahu apparently warned Mr Al Shara against pursuing a deadly campaign to subdue the mostly Druze southern governorate of Sweida. It was the first known instance of the Syrian and Israeli leaders speaking to each other.
However, the Israeli incursions have increased, with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights saying that 280 were recorded in September alone. Forty-nine Syrians remain in Israeli detention after Israel released 14 last month.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said in August that the military performed what he described as daily activity to “eliminate threats and remnants of the Assad regime” and to prevent “dangerous consolidation of the new regime”.
Carmit Valensi, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, said Mr Al Shara “may have become substantially more pragmatic, but the system around him has not necessarily undergone the same transformation”.
Ms Valensi said the Syrian President was surrounded by former members of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, the former Al Qaeda affiliate he founded during the civil war, and hardline security commanders. “The test is no longer simply whether Al Shara has changed. It is whether he can discipline, transform and ultimately institutionalise the system around him.”
However, a prolonged Israeli military presence and repeated incursions could weaken Mr Al Shara to the advantage of “ISIS, Iranian networks, Hezbollah, Palestinian factions, arms trafficking and local militias”, she said.
“In that sense, fragmentation can create tactical advantages but strategic instability.”
In Quneitra, Syrian security forces have set up roadblocks to guard against infiltrators who could try to attack Israeli positions. Syrians who are not from the province need permission to enter parts of a buffer zone created in 1974, which has been shrinking because of the territorial grabs by Israel.
Unlike during the Assad regime, Syrian authorities have avoided using threatening rhetoric against Israel and focused on garnering condemnation of its actions from allies, and promoting cases, such as that of Mr Saadeddin, to show the human impact.
An Arab-Israeli lawyer heard about the case and recently contacted Mr Saadeddin, offering to try to help his son.
Since losing his land, Mr Saadeddin has been working for other land owners. This week, he was supervising two dozen workers brought from eastern Syria to harvest olives around Jabata Al Khashab.
Additional reporting by Thomas Helm in Jerusalem