Al-Sharaa Tells New York the Israel Deal Nearly Closed; Quneitra Keeps Counting Sheep

Speaking at an Atlantic Council panel in New York on Tuesday night, on the sidelines of the General Assembly, Ahmad al-Sharaa gave his most extensive public account yet of the Israeli file. “There were several sessions of negotiations with Israel, and we almost reached 90% of agreements,” he said, according to the Turkish state-linked outlet A News, adding that Israel then withdrew from the agreement for “different reasons.” The Jerusalem Post, reporting the same panel, carried the line that has travelled furthest: “It is not appropriate that what happened on October 7 sets the policy for Syria. This is not logical, and this brings more security threats.” He added: “If you want to protect your own security, you need to respect the security of others.” JPost summarised the substance as direct talks running for nearly a year and a Syrian insistence on returning to the 1974 disengagement lines.

The next day, in a roughly ten-minute address to the General Debate, al-Sharaa told the Assembly that Syria “is rising” and had moved “from crisis to an opportunity,” citing state control over arms, the lifting of international sanctions and the “safe and decent” return of about 3.5 million refugees and displaced people. On Israel he was harder: “We reject Israeli attempts to impose a fait accompli. We reject their aggressions, which undermine peace and security,” asserting 500 air strikes, more than 1,200 incursions and 300 detentions inside Syria. Al Jazeera presented those figures as his assertion; no baseline period was given and no independent corroboration has surfaced. On Thursday, the Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker logged its own entry for 24 September: Israeli forces patrolling in Quneitra assaulted a shepherd in al-Asha and ran over two sheep, killing them.

Assessment: Two things are missing from the week and both matter. There is no Israeli response on the record to the “90%” claim, which means the collapse narrative currently exists only in the version told by the party that did not walk away — a negotiating position dressed as history. And the 1974 lines demand is not a detail: it is flatly incompatible with the buffer-zone deployments Israel has held since December 2024. Read the numbers with the same caution. Al-Sharaa’s “300 detentions” is a different category from the “dozens” whose families protested outside UNDOF headquarters in Quneitra on 17 August; conflating them would flatter both claims. The shepherd is the part nobody will cite, and the part that actually recurs.