FT: How Israel's aggressive new security plan is reshaping the Middle East

Key topicsIsrael expands military control into Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and West BankNew buffer zones and outposts mark shift to aggressive defense doctrineCritics warn of rising regional tensions, border violations, and insurgency.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By Neri Zilber on Mount Hermon and Steven Bernard and Jana Tauschinski in London.Shaken by October 7, the country is seizing territory and flattening villages to build buffer zones while routinely striking neighboursAt over 2,000 metres above the Mediterranean, an Israeli soldier can gaze from the peak of Mount Hermon into the valley below, now filled with thousands of fellow troops, at least nine new outposts, paved access roads and freshly dug trenches.The soldier is looking upon some of the hundreds of square kilometres seized from Syria in early December, after an Islamist-led rebel offensive toppled the regime of Bashar al-Assad.Similar scenes are being repeated across Israel’s frontiers, as its troops hold fortified positions inside Lebanon, clear wide swaths of territory in Gaza, and raze homes in the refugee camps of the occupied West Bank.“It’s a new world,” said one Israeli military official atop the mountain, adding that an entire division once in the occupied Golan Heights has “advanced into Syria”.It is the embodiment of a new, hyper-aggressive Israeli military doctrine reshaping the Middle East after Hamas’s devastating October 7 2023 attack from Gaza and the outbreak of regional war.No longer content with border walls and early warning systems, Israel is seizing territory from its neighbours, building buffer zones and bombing perceived threats as far as Beirut and Damascus in massive displays of force.It is a vision Israel officials say was born out of the trauma and lessons of October 7, with an Israel Defense Forces inquiry this year concluding that the “strategic misconception” behind the assault was allowing Hamas to solidify its hold over Gaza.“You can’t let a terror army build at your door,” argued one senior Israeli military official, who like other officials interviewed requested anonymity.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month that Israel was “changing the face of the Middle East”.In the process Israel is ripping up internationally backed borders, violating its neighbours’ sovereignty and — say critics at home and overseas — escalating tensions and the risk of conflict.Israel’s renewed offensive in Gaza, along with its expansionism in Syria, Lebanon and the West Bank, has provoked criticism from around the region.Lebanon’s leaders have said “there can be no peace” and “no lasting stability” if the IDF does not withdraw from the country, while the new Syrian government has slammed Israel’s “ongoing aggression . . . in flagrant violation of national sovereignty and international law”..Read more:.The Economist: Israel’s pursuit of regional dominance risks internal unity and global ties.Barbara Leaf, a former US diplomat in the Biden administration, said Israel’s action in Syria “risks stirring up the kind of agitation and animosity that wasn’t there”.In recent weeks, IDF troops in the Syrian security zone have come under fire on two separate occasions, with some analysts warning of the potential for an insurgency as the new regime in Damascus attempts to bring the fragmented nation under its control.“There are many ways to get at your security, there are many channels” aside from military force, Leaf said, alluding to the need for back channels between Israel and Syria.Since it seized the Golan Heights during the 1967 war with Syria, Israel viewed the elevated territory — of which Mount Hermon is part — as a strategic, protective buffer zone.But after Islamist rebels led by Ahmed al-Sharaa seized Damascus in December following 13 years of civil war, Israel took pre-emptive action, launching waves of air strikes that decimated Syrian military assets and prevented them falling into potentially hostile hands.The IDF also sent in ground forces to seize the 235 sq km UN-monitored demilitarised zone, saying it will stay for an “unlimited period of time”, while also launching raids deeper inside Syria.Netanyahu has even gone as far as to declare that another 50km into southern Syria, stretching almost as far as Damascus, should be part of a demilitarised “area of influence”.Israeli jets this month struck a handful of Syrian air bases even further away over concerns that they could be used by Turkish forces.In Lebanon, the IDF has struck Hizbollah targets on a near-daily basis despite a US-brokered ceasefire last November that ended a year-long war between them.Israel has also retained at least five “strategic” positions inside southern Lebanon, building outposts on high ground across the border from Israeli communities.On a recent visit to Israel’s northern border, the FT saw one position inside Lebanon, manned by a company of reservist paratroopers on a hill near the Israeli village of Metula.One local Israeli official argued these outposts were vital to ensuring residents displaced from the war between Israel and Hizbollah are able to return home. “The IDF needs to stay in [Lebanon] and remain aggressive,” the official added, expressing a widely held view among the Israeli public.Nearby, the Lebanese Shia villages of Kfar Kila and al-Khiyam, where officials said Hizbollah had a military presence, lay in ruins.“This is what victory looks like. The IDF is here, and the communities below are protected and active,” Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said on a tour of the area last month. “And the [Lebanese] villages on the other side are crushed.”The scene was reminiscent of Israel’s scorched earth tactics against Palestinian militants. In the West Bank, the UN estimates that some 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced since Israel in January launched a major offensive against gunmen in the Jenin refugee camp, later expanding it to other nearby areas.The Jenin camp has been almost completely emptied of its residents, with large parts — including main roads, schools, mosques and dozens of buildings — destroyed.The IDF has set up outposts inside Jenin, as well as in the Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps — all nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority — consisting of several battalions to clear the areas and create throughways for future operations.Israeli officials say the troops will stay in place indefinitely, with Palestinian residents not allowed to return before the end of the year.It marks a shift in strategy for Israel, which for two decades launched raids into PA-controlled areas of the West Bank but refrained from maintaining a long-term presence.The IDF insists that the new outposts established in Syria, Lebanon and the West Bank camps are “temporary”, and can be taken down in a matter of days.What happens in Gaza, however, will almost certainly be different. Since the start of the war, senior Israeli officials made clear they intended to build a 1km buffer zone inside the strip to ensure another October 7-style attack could never happen.More than 18 months into the war, entire sections of the Palestinian enclave have been reduced to rubble. It “looks like Mars”, one Israeli reservist in south Gaza said. “If there’s a building standing, it probably means we’re using it.”Yet Israel’s plan appears to be far from the over, with the IDF increasing its hold on the territory since resuming its offensive last month after an eight-week ceasefire.Katz, the defence minister, threatened last month to expand these border “security zones” and bring yet more of Gaza under “permanent Israeli control” if Hamas did not capitulate and release the Israeli hostages it still holds.Netanyahu has never hid his desire to maintain “overall security control” of the enclave. He has also enthusiastically adopted US President Donald Trump’s proposal to expel the Gazan population and turn the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.Ehud Yaari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Trump’s backing helped ensure international pressure on Israel to leave the territories it seized was manageable, and that Israel would continue with this aggressive new strategy.“This is what the vaunted [postwar] ‘Day After’ will look like” across the various fronts, he said.Though domestic criticism of the government’s new security doctrine has been nearly non-existent, one exception has been Israel Ziv, a retired IDF major general, who wrote in Israeli media last week that the government was “politically in love with the idea of taking over” territory.The “unnecessary” Israeli presence in Syria, in “territory that is not ours”, will backfire, he wrote, much like Israel’s two-decade occupation of a “security zone” in Lebanon from 1982 to 2000, which helped spawn Hizbollah’s insurgency and resulted in the death of over 1,000 Israeli soldiers.Current Israeli officials disagree, arguing that the resistance to the IDF presence in these areas is itself proof of the need to stay. “Not all of Syria loves us,” the military official atop Mount Hermon said. “It only strengthens our reason for being there.”.© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd.

FT: How Israel's aggressive new security plan is reshaping the Middle East

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