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Israel conducting military drills in Syria's occupied Golan Heights

Iran Press TV

Monday, 24 November 2025 2:24 PM

The Israeli army has launched a large-scale military exercise in the occupied Golan Heights, following the regime's assassination of a senior commander of Lebanon's resistance movement Hezbollah.

In a statement on Monday, the Israeli military announced that it had begun the two-day drills, claiming to prepare itself for "a range of scenarios."

According to the statement, the exercise, dubbed "Shield of Strength," started with "a Chief of Staff test as part of a headquarters exercise."

Amid the drill, the Israeli military's Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir visited "the 210th 'Bashan' Regional Division," which is responsible for the border between the occupied territories and Syria in the Golan Heights and the Mount Dov area on the border with Lebanon.

Zamir instructed Israeli forces to increase their level of alertness following the killing of Haytham Ali Tabatabai, a senior commander of Hezbollah, in an Israeli airstrike in the southern suburb of Beirut on Sunday.

The Lebanese resistance movement released a statement on Sunday night announcing the martyrdom of Commander Tabatabai and four other resistance fighters in "a treacherous Israeli attack."

Hezbollah stated that Tabatabai's martyrdom would inspire renewed hope and determination among resistance fighters, promising to continue the struggle against the "Zionist enemy and its patron, America."

The assassination comes amid intensifying Israeli strikes on Lebanon in violation of a ceasefire reached last year.

The military exercise in Syria also came following last week's visit by Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the buffer zone in southern Syria, which separates the occupied Golan Heights from the rest of the Arab country, where he met troops stationed on Syrian land Israel has occupied for months.

Israel has conducted repeated acts of aggression across the Syrian territory following the collapse of former President Bashar al-Assad's government last year. Netanyahu has ordered his forces to push deeper into Syrian territory and seize several strategic locations.

Instead of resistance to the ongoing Israeli military operations, the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led regime's lack of action and its normalisation overtures to Tel Aviv appear to have given Israel greater leeway to expand its occupation and increase the intensity of its airstrikes.

Foreign-backed militants, led by HTS - a group that was previously affiliated with the al-Qaeda terrorist group, took control of Damascus and declared an end to President Bashar al-Assad's rule last December.