Al-Sharaa and Netanyahu trade claims over southern Syria on consecutive days at the UN

Ahmed al-Sharaa opened the second day of leaders' speeches at the 81st General Assembly session on Wednesday 23 September, his second address to the General Debate after the 80th session in 2025. The speech ran in two registers. In the first, recorded in the UN’s own summary, he said Syria “is rising” and had begun to reclaim “its place among nations,” a framing UN News described as a new phase of revival. In the second, he turned to Israel: the Washington Post reports he said Israel has carried out more than 500 air and artillery strikes on Syria since he took power nearly two years ago, criticised the occupation of southern Syria, and called the Golan Heights an inseparable part of the country. Al Jazeera reports he called for Israeli withdrawal from internationally recognised Syrian territory and said: “We reject Israeli attempts to impose a fait accompli.”

Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the same session on Thursday 24 September. According to the Times of Israel’s live blog, he answered al-Sharaa directly, characterising him as having demanded that Israeli soldiers withdraw from the buffer zone Israel holds inside Syria, and responded on the Golan by invoking Jewish historical claim. The same speech turned on the United Kingdom and France over accusations of colonialism — “Give me a break,” Netanyahu said, pointing to those countries' own colonial records. Protesters hung an effigy of him outside as he spoke. The exchange follows an August pattern of Israeli action rather than rhetoric: on 19 August, eight Israeli strikes hit the runway at Abu Duhur air base in Idlib, causing damage but no casualties according to Syrian state television, with NPR reporting the aim was to stop Turkish deployment there. Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia condemned the strikes.

Assessment: Keep the two Israeli-Syrian files apart, because Damascus and Jerusalem both profit from blurring them. The Golan is a rhetorical claim neither side expects to move; the buffer zone and the southern deployment are the live, negotiable matter, and the one on which Abu Duhur showed Israel will act. The 500 figure is Damascus’s own count as relayed by the Washington Post, not a monitor’s tally — Al Jazeera’s standing formulation is the vaguer “hundreds since December 2024.” Treat it as a diplomatic instrument: a number produced to make an argument at a rostrum, useful for what it tells you about Syrian positioning and not yet about what happened in the air.