News - Middle East: For years, the Israeli regime coveted Syria’s abundant water resources, particularly in the country’s southern regions, to mitigate its own chronic water shortages.

After the dramatic fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus last month, Tel Aviv unleashed an aggressive and unprecedented military assault on Syria with multiple strategic objectives.

Israeli forces swiftly expanded beyond the occupied Golan Heights, seizing the buffer zone and Mount Hermon—a pivotal peak that straddles the borders of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Yet this incursion was only the beginning. On Thursday, Syrian media reported that Israeli occupation forces captured the Al-Mantara Dam, the lifeline for Quneitra and its surrounding areas.

It came as they bombed the headquarters of the Syrian Army’s 90th Brigade in Sasa, near Damascus, as a cover-up for their latest theft.

Located just a few hundred meters east of Quneitra, some 50 kilometers southwest of the Syrian capital, Al-Mantara Dam sits within the buffer zone established on the Golan Heights in 1979.

This vital water reservoir has for long sustained not only Quneitra province, where the occupied Holan Heights is located, but also the broader arid southern region of Syria.

With the occupation of Al-Mantara Dam, the most significant dam in southern Syria, experts say nearly 40 percent of Syria's water resources are now under the illegal control of the Israeli regime.

Before Al-Mantara, they occupied five other key sites that supply water to Syria from neighbors.

The city of Quneitra and its surrounding areas fell to Israeli forces in December, days after Assad’s government collapsed and West-backed militants, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, seized control.

In rapid succession, the Tel Aviv regime occupied 266 square kilometers of buffer zone territory, flagrantly violating the 1974 Agreement on Disengagement. Israeli occupation forces then pushed further east, confiscating additional Syrian territory illegally.

The occupation zone now stretches from the eastern slopes of Mount Hermon on the Lebanese border to the Yarmuk River valley near Jordan in the south.

After advancing into the region, Israeli troops established military checkpoints, erected earthen barriers, and imposed strict entry and exit controls, upending the daily lives of local residents.

Angered by these disruptions, Syrians across occupied settlements staged widespread protests. Israeli forces responded with live fire, further stoking tensions and outrage.

The so-called "safe zone" narrative invoked grim memories of previous occupations in Lebanon, the Golan, and Palestine—territories that the Zionist regime dominated for decades and still seeks to annex and control.

Occupied dams and rivers

A closer look at the borders of the Israeli occupation zone in Syria reveals that the focus was on capturing all the vital reservoirs and rivers in the occupied Golan Heights.

In addition to the 3.5 km long Al-Mantara embankment dam, located within the UN buffer zone, nine other dams outside the zone were also captured, all in the Quneitra and Dara'a provinces of Syria.

The Israeli occupation army also occupied the smaller Rwihina Dam, located 2.5 km downstream on the same Ruqqad River, otherwise the natural border of the Golan Heights to the east.

On the same river, another ten kilometers downstream, there is the 3-kilometer-long Kudna Dam, occupied together with the nearby smaller Bariqa Dam.

Two other relatively larger occupied dams on the Ruqqad River are the Ghadir al-Bustan Dam near the settlements of Zaghbi and Nasiriya, and the Jisr Ruqqad Dam near Saida and Ain Zakar.

According to Weizmann, the control of the Litani, Jordan and Yarmuk rivers, which was expressed in a letter to the British Prime Minister, was very much central to the future Zionist entity's security.

David Ben-Gurion, another key Zionist founder and the entity's first prime minister, in 1948 similarly reiterated that their boundaries include the southern banks of the Litani River, but the League of Nations rejected these claims to Lebanese territory

The post-war consensus is that Lake Tiberias, the Jordan River, and the Litani River have been Israeli targets in numerous wars from 1948 to the present, including last year's attempts to break out onto the banks of the latter Lebanese river.

The Zionist entity today receives about 80 percent of its water supply through five key desalination plants, located next to coastal power plants.

However, these facilities are large in surface area and fragile in a potential conflict, especially with ballistic missile strikes, that could leave millions of settlers without access to water.

Hence, the Israeli regime continues to resort to old plans to occupy foreign water-rich territories, which is being witnessed in Syria currently.

Abulmalik al-Houthi, leader of the Yemeni Ansarullah resistance movement, in his speech on Saturday, also pointed to the fact that Israeli aggression in Syria aims to seize control of water resources.

Press TV