The Israeli army is running 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.
The hiking route ventures into a buffer zone that was previously "off limits" to both Syria and Israel under a 1974 ceasefire agreement. The Israeli army took advantage of the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad last December to seize the territory.
Israel formally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, although the United Nations has refused to recognise the move 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 over 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. | 
