Syria’s Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani has met the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Roman Gofman, in Jordan as Damascus and Tel Aviv seek to ease tensions following an Israeli strike on a Syrian airbase near the Turkish border.
Syrian state news agency SANA, citing a diplomatic source, said the talks were mediated by the United States and involved a “high-level Israeli delegation”, reports Al jazeera.
The AFP news agency reported that al-Shaibani met Gofman during the talks.
According to SANA, the discussions “focused on establishing practical mechanisms to halt Israeli attacks, arrests and targeting operations” and on “reviving negotiations for a lasting security agreement between the two sides”.
The talks also covered efforts to reduce tensions between Israel and Türkiye and prevent their rivalry from spilling into Syrian territory, SANA reported.
The United States has been trying for more than a year to broker a security agreement between Israel and the government of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on Syria since the fall of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 and deployed troops into a United Nations-patrolled buffer zone that had long separated Israeli and Syrian forces in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Israel also bombed the Abu Duhur airbase in north-western Idlib on Thursday, saying the strike was aimed at preventing Turkish troops from deploying there. Syria and Türkiye have denied the claim.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have exchanged sharp criticism since the incident, adding to tensions between the two leaders.
During Sunday’s talks, the Syrian side stressed “that Syria is a sovereign state with the full right to rebuild and develop its national army and determine its alliances and partnerships in line with its national interests”, SANA reported.
Damascus rejected “any arrangements or mechanisms that would restrict these sovereign rights”, it said.
Syria’s immediate priorities remain an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before al-Assad’s overthrow and the full restoration of the 1974 disengagement agreement, according to SANA.
Syrian officials also reaffirmed Damascus’s sovereignty over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Israel’s ‘red lines’
Israeli media described the talks as “positive” and reported that Israeli officials had entered the negotiations with several red lines.
These include preventing Turkish military activity in Syria, keeping the Syrian side of the Golan Heights demilitarised, “ensuring the security” of Syria’s Druze community and stopping the Syrian army from acquiring certain strategic weapons systems.
Israel has also made any withdrawal from Syrian territory it occupies conditional on “diplomatic achievements”.
During earlier rounds of US-mediated talks, Syria and Israel agreed on a joint mechanism to share intelligence and defuse tensions. However, negotiations froze at the end of February when the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran, with no date set for their resumption.
Ahead of the latest meeting, al-Shaibani told Reuters that Damascus did not trust Israel but that the “door remained open for diplomacy”. He said Syria had completely cut contact after Israel attacked the Abu al-Duhur airbase the previous week.
Al-Shaibani said the two sides had agreed on paper to “almost everything” around the beginning of the year, including arrangements for security zones in southern Syria and a buffer zone where only UN forces would be present.
Hassan Mneimneh, a political analyst and researcher at the Middle East Institute, told Al Jazeera that the latest talks were unlikely to ease tensions given Israel’s track record.
“It’s quite the opposite, meaning now that Syria has indicated its desire to have the situation de-escalate, Israel is likely to bring in more demands and have the Americans basically negotiate these new demands with Syria, against any kind of expansion of Turkish presence in the north and beyond the north,” he said.
Mneimneh said Syria was “afraid that the country will become a battlefield” between Israel and Türkiye. He also said Damascus was concerned about Israel’s territorial expansion in Syria, stretching “all the way to Hermon, to Jabal al-Sheikh in its totality almost, and all the way to three southern provinces”.
From Syria’s perspective, Mneimneh said, the talks with Israel appear aimed at preventing “the disintegration of Syrian authority” and ensuring that any conflict between Israel and Türkiye does not stop Syria from “forming, establishing, consolidating polity after the fall of” al-Assad.
