Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap! Here’s your wrap-up of the latest articles from our contributors, including our colleagues at Local Call.

After the collapse of the Assad regime on December 8, Baker Zoubi reported from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, where residents celebrated the news but remain wary amid political instability and further Israeli encroachment inside Syria. Meanwhile, Meron Rapoport spoke with Bassam Al-Kuwatli, who founded the Syrian Liberal Party (Ahrar) in exile and serves as its president, about his plans to return to Syria to push for a democratic future.

Just hours after Assad’s fall, Israeli forces were already pushing into Syrian territory, conquering the Syrian side of Mount Hermon/Jabal A-Shaykh and the buffer zone between Syria and the Golan Heights that has been in place for more than half a century. But so too are settler groups eager to seize the opportunity to erect outposts and takeover land, as Illy Pe’ery revealed — including one that already claimed to have crossed into Syria.

At the end of a deadly harvest season in the West Bank, Imad Abu Hawash wrote about how restrictions and attacks by the Israeli military, together with rampant settler violence, left many Palestinians unable to harvest this year’s crop. In the West Bank city of Hebron, Oren Ziv reported, Israeli soldiers have been systematically abusing Palestinians, subjecting them to random detentions, physical violence, and humiliations — as revealed by testimonies gathered in a new report from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

And one year after an Israeli airstrike buried him and his family alive in Gaza, Mohammed Mhawish recounted the traumatic experience of that day — and how, even in exile, the faces of those who didn’t survive continue to haunt him.

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