QUNEITRA/PARIS — All that once grew on Abu Taha’s 200 dunums (200,000 square meters) of farmland and pastures has yellowed and died, after Israeli aircraft sprayed large areas of Syria’s southern Quneitra province with herbicides at least three times in late January. Abu Taha, who is in his 60s, farms and raises livestock in al-Rafid, a village just meters from the border between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. His home lies within the once-demilitarized buffer zone between the two countries, which Israel invaded and occupied when the Assad regime fell in December 2024. On January 25, 27 and 30, Abu Taha watched as Israeli planes flying at a low altitude sprayed the land with unknown substances. It was not his first encounter with the country’s forces. Several months ago, Israeli forces shot Abu Taha in his foot while he was grazing his sheep near al-Rafid. His 14-year-old grandson was also detained for four days. For more than a year, the occupying forces have regularly fired on herders, carried out arrests and raids and bulldozed farmland in border regions of Syria’s Daraa and Quneitra provinces. “Not content with preventing us from grazing our sheep and shooting at us, the Israeli occupation sprayed our land with chemicals,” Abu Taha told Syria Direct . The spraying, which extended from the Quneitra villages of Taranja and Jubata al-Khashab in the north to Saida in the south, damaged land belonging to 297 farmers, Muhammad Rahhal, who heads the Quneitra Agricultural Directorate, told Syria Direct . The affected area included 937 dunums of crops, 2,891 dunums of pastures and 855 dunums of fruit trees. An analysis of three independent spectral vegetation indices, using data from the Sentinel-2 satellite, shows a simultaneous decline in vegetation cover in the Quneitra village of Kudna over the weeks after herbicides were sprayed. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), a measure of plant health and density, fell from 0.47 on January 19—showing winter vegetation was in good condition before the spraying operations—to 0.34 on February 8 and 0.15 on February 13. The advanced vegetation index (AVI) and soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI) show a similar trend, bolstering evidence that the decline is an actual change in plant activity, not merely an effect of soil exposure or atmospheric disturbance. The Syrian Ministry of Agriculture analyzed water, plant and soil samples taken from the affected areas, but did not specify the nature of the substances detected in its February 11 statement announcing the results, raising questions about what herbicides were sprayed and what their long-term effects could be. Israeli forces conducted similar spraying operations in southern Lebanon over the same period. Laboratory tests there confirmed the use of highly concentrated glyphosate, which directly damaged crops and soil fertility, according to Lebanese government statements. Plants growing on agricultural land in the southern Quneitr
Originally reported by Syria Direct. Published on ABN12.