By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
Israeli soldiers on Friday opened fire on a group of Syrians protesting against Israel’s expanding occupation of south Syria.
Syrian media reported that one person was wounded after Israeli troops opened fire Friday on demonstrators in southern Syria.
According to the local Daraa 24 outlet, residents of towns in the Yarmouk River basin gathered near a former Syrian army post close to the village of Maariya to protest against the IDF presence in Syria.
The outlet said the soldiers opened fire in the air to stop the demonstrators from approaching, and one person was hit directly and wounded.
“The moment the occupation soldiers opened fire on demonstrators near the Al-Jazeera barracks, west of the village of Maariyah in the Yarmouk Basin area, which resulted in the injury of a young man,” Daraa 24 said on Twitter, sharing video of the shooting.
From AP, “Syrian villagers near the Golan Heights say Israeli forces are banning them from their fields”:
Israeli forces have set up a position in an abandoned Syrian army base in the village of Maariyah and prevented local farmers from accessing their fields, residents said Thursday.
Associated Press journalists who visited the area saw the Israeli troops from a distance and watched a local resident waving a white flag approach to speak with them.
The village, on the western edge of Syria’s southern Daraa province, is near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, but outside of a buffer zone in the Golan established by a 1974 ceasefire agreement between Syria and Israel.
Abdel Raouf Issa, a resident of Maariyah, said the Israeli military had penetrated about 1 kilometer (two-thirds of a mile) into the village and “is demanding that we hand over all weapons to the occupation. We told them that we have no weapons at all.”
“They prevented us from farming. They prevented us from moving,” he said. “We call on the United Nations to remove the occupation as soon as possible.”
Kamal Saleh Damara, a local official in the village, said, “Thank God, we were happy that HTS came,” referring to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the main insurgent group in the coalition that unseated Assad. “But then Israel came, and it is preventing people from coming and going and moving.”
The Israeli military said in a statement that it is “operating within the buffer zone and in several additional locations in its proximity to ensure the security of Israel’s northern border.” It declined to comment on specific locations where its troops are deployed.
Israel has been bombing the hell out of Syria for over a week now following their “liberation” from Bashar al-Assad.
Following the fall of Assad, Israel carried out hundreds of strikes across Syria to destroy their air defense systems, long-range missiles, weapons stockpiles, airfields, anti-aircraft batteries, drones, fighter jets, naval vessels, tanks and weapon production sites.
Whatever their complaints were about Assad, Syria is now operating entirely under Israel’s thumb.