The Israeli army's 'tourist hikes' in occupied Golan Heights

The Israeli army is running hiking tours for civilians in territory it recently seized from Syria.

Tickets for the hikes in the Golan Heights – scheduled twice a day throughout the week of the Jewish Passover festival – sold out almost immediately. The widely criticised venture marks a "provocative intersection of militarised control, tourism expansion and territorial assertion" in one of the "most politically sensitive" regions of the world, said Travel and Tour World.

'Flashpoint for violence'

Groups undertaking the tour are transported to the area in bulletproof buses and "are monitored by armed escorts". The hiking route ventures into a buffer-zone area that was previously "off limits" to both Syria and Israel under a 1974 ceasefire agreement. The Israeli army took advantage of the fall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad last December to seize the territory.

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The tour itinerary includes the Syrian slopes of Mount Hermon, the Ottoman-era Hejaz railway, and Shebaa Farms on an Israeli-occupied strip of Lebanese land traditionally believed to be the site of God's covenant with Abraham – and a "flashpoint for violence" between Israel and Hezbollah for decades, said The Guardian.

The Israeli Defence Force is co-organising the trips with the Golan Regional Council, a religious education centre and environmental groups, as part of a wider initiative called "Returning to a Safer North". In a statement, the IDF said it was "important for us to restore heritage and tourism to the region" and to "tell the story of the battles fought during the war".

Organisers said demand was so high, they hope to offer further tours to Syria after Passover, if the security situation allows it.

'Greater Israel'

The Golan Heights is a rocky plateau in the southwestern corner of Syria, bordering Israel, Lebanon and Jordan.

Israel formally annexed the region in 1981, although the United Nations has refused to recognise the annexation as legitimate. In 2019, however, the US, in Donald Trump's first term, became the only country in the world to recognise Israel's sovereignty in the Golan Heights – a decision that was met with shock and fury, particularly in the Arab world.

The further buffer-zone land grab in December is "seen as a component of the so-called 'Greater Israel' project", said Iranian state broadcaster Press TV. "Greater Israel" typically refers to "the notion of expanding Israel's territory and sovereignty" to what its proponents see as its "historic biblical land", said Middle East Monitor.

The term has "come to mean very different things to different groups", said Adrian Stein in The Times of Israel. "In Israel and the diaspora today", the term is generally understood to mean "extending Israel's sovereignty to the West Bank". But, in more extreme interpretations, it also encompasses the territories in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.