Middle East crisis live: Israeli government approves plans to extend occupation of Golan Heights | World news

The United Nations intends to offer all kinds of help to the Syrian people, UN Syria envoy Geir Pedersen told Syrian rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa and caretaker prime minister Mohammad al-Bashir during a meeting in Damascus, according to a statement released by the UN envoy’s office on Monday.

Nesrine Malik

Last week, time collapsed. Bashar al-Assad’s fall recalled scenes across the region from the start of the Arab spring almost 14 years ago. Suddenly history felt vivid, its memories sharpened. In fact it no longer felt like history. Scenes that it seemed we would never see again – of crowds thronging the squares; the obscene riches of despots exposed, their fortresses stormed, their iconography desecrated – unlocked a familiar, almost sickening sense of possibility. Of giddiness, of horror at what fleeing dictators had left in their wake, and of hope. Syria’s long revolution – the death, torture, imprisonment and exile that Assad’s crushing of it unleashed – makes its successful end bittersweet. The price was so high, which makes its spoils even more dear.

The moment is also different in another way. In those 14 years, other revolutions across the region either unravelled or resulted in the retrenchment of dictatorial regimes under new management. And so that sense of untrammelled optimism that followed the fall of that first crop of dictators is tempered by some wariness of what comes next. But it can and should be a productive wariness rather than a reason for despair. Because what Syria benefits from now is an understanding of the fragility of this period. To those of us who experienced it before in other countries, it felt like a time when the momentum of revolution was unstoppable and cleansing. It had a kinetic energy that swept away the old systems to be replaced by new administrations, armed with good intentions and popular support, that would simply figure it out.

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A war monitor group said early on Monday that Israeli strikes had targeted military sites in Syria’s coastal Tartus region, calling them “the heaviest strikes” in the area in more than a decade.

“Israeli warplanes launched strikes’ targeting a series of sites including air defence units and ‘surface-to-surface missile depots’”, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in what it said were “the heaviest strikes in Syria’s coastal region since the start of strikes in 2012”.

In other news:

• Benjamin Netanyahu has said he had a “very friendly, warm and important discussion” with Donald Trump over the weekend about his plans in Syria and efforts to secure the release of hostages in Gaza. In an address on Sunday night the prime minister said he spoke to Trump on Saturday adding: “We discussed the need to complete Israel’s victory and we spoke at length about the efforts we are making to free our hostages. “We will continue to act relentlessly to return home all of our hostages, the living and the deceased.” A Trump spokesperson on Sunday declined to give further details about the call.

• At least 12 Palestinians were killed, including children, in an Israeli airstrike on a shelter for the displaced in Gaza’s Khan Younis school turned shelter for displaced Palestinians on Sunday, the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said.

• Syria’s de facto leader Ahmad al-Sharaa discussed with the United Nations envoy for Syria the need to reconsider a roadmap outlined by the Security Council for the country in 2015, the Syrian ruling General Command said on Sunday.

• Israel’s government approved a plan on Sunday to expand Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights it occupies, saying it had acted “in light of the war and the new front facing Syria” and out of a desire to double the Israeli population on the Golan. “Strengthening the Golan is strengthening the State of Israel, and it is especially important at this time. We will continue to hold onto it, cause it to blossom, and settle in it,” Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement reported by Reuters.

• Schools have reopened in Damascus as celebrations over Bashar al-Assad fleeing Syria continue.