Sharaa says the Israel deal was nine-tenths done; Jerusalem has said nothing to confirm it

Speaking around his 23 September appearance at the UN General Assembly, Sharaa said Damascus and Israel had reached roughly 90 percent agreement on a security arrangement before Israel withdrew and introduced new conditions. The account was carried by anews.com.tr, a Turkish outlet aligned with the government in Ankara — which has its own interest in casting Israel as the party that walked away — and no Israeli confirmation or denial has surfaced in what we have been able to retrieve. The trajectory is the story rather than the fraction: in late September 2025 a Trump administration source told the Times of Israel, in a report later aggregated by Levant24, that the deal was “99 percent complete.” That claim sat two removes from the speaker. Sharaa, in an Al Jazeera newsfeed clip the same day, answered a question on Israeli violations by suggesting Trump give New Jersey to Israel instead of the Golan Heights.

The documented state of play is older. Axios reported on 6 January 2026 that Washington had proposed a demilitarised economic zone along the Israel–Syria border, with the Israeli team including ambassador Yechiel Leiter, Netanyahu’s military secretary Roman Gofman and the acting national security adviser; a senior Israeli official said both sides wanted more frequent meetings and confidence-building measures. What has happened since has been kinetic. On 19 August eight Israeli strikes hit the runway at Abu Duhur air base in Idlib, with Syrian state television reporting damage and no casualties; NPR reported the strikes were intended to forestall a Turkish deployment, and US envoy Tom Barrack later characterised the attack as “baiting” Turkey. On 22 August an Israeli drone struck a civilian vehicle in the south, which the Israeli military confirmed; Syria’s foreign ministry called it a “flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the Syrian Arab Republic.”

Barrack has also said Sharaa’s government has neither “adopted a predatory posture nor maintained proxy forces” — an unusually forward American character reference for Damascus, delivered in the same weeks Israeli aircraft were hitting Syrian infrastructure. The Christian Science Monitor, reporting on 3 September on the Israeli–Turkish rivalry inside Syria, quoted analysts who judge that neither power wants a war.

Assessment: Percentages are a negotiating instrument, not a measurement, and this one now exists only in one party’s telling relayed by its patron’s press. Treat it as positioning. The useful data point is the direction: the figure has fallen while the venue has shifted from a negotiating table to a runway in Idlib. Silence from Jerusalem past a week is itself informative, as is Barrack’s reading that Israeli strikes are addressed to Ankara rather than to Damascus. If a Turkish deployment eventually lands in Idlib without being struck, that will tell us more about the deconfliction line than any further round of percentages.