How Israel’s New ‘Security Belts’ Could Impact Middle East Stability – Analysis

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June 18, 2026 
 Arab News
By Anan Tello

In what it describes as a campaign of self-defense, Israel has seized approximately 1,000 sq. km of land in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria since October 2023 — about 5 percent of its territory within the 1949 borders, according to a recent analysis.

The new zones of control, rights groups say, have displaced millions of people, razed residential areas and destroyed swathes of farmland. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described these territorial seizures as “deep security belts” beyond Israel’s borders.

In a video message in late March, he said Israeli forces now hold about half of Gaza, control territory in Syria from the summit of Mount Hermon to the Yarmouk basin and have carved out “a vast buffer zone” in Lebanon to prevent infiltration and missile attacks.


The posture has continued to harden.

After Pakistan announced on June 14 that the US and Iran had reached a peace deal — one that observers speculate could include a halt to violence in Lebanon — Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said his troops would not withdraw from land seized in Lebanon, Gaza or Syria.

In a June 15 statement, Katz said Israel would remain in those areas “without a time limit” to “protect the border and Israeli communities,” the Israeli news website Ynet reported.

“The area will be cleared of local residents, and all terror infrastructure, above and below ground, including homes in contact-line villages that served as terror outposts, will be destroyed,” the statement added.

Netanyahu struck the same note that day, pledging that Israeli forces would remain in Lebanon, where Israel occupies more than 570 sq. km of territory, according to a recent analysis by the Financial Times.

“We will stay in the Lebanon security buffer zone for as long as necessary,” he told a press conference.

For critics, these statements reflect more than a short-term military doctrine.

Chris Doyle, director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding, said years of Israeli “impunity” had enabled it to seize land in neighboring territories.

“Israel has expanded its territory in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Syria, occupying yet further swathes of land,” Doyle told Arab News. “It’s been able to do this because of a climate of impunity that has existed for decades and is even more favorable to Israel than ever before.”

Some of those expansions, particularly in the West Bank, are “ideological — out of a belief of a greater Israel,” he said. But others are intended to pressure states, create divisions and keep regional crises “bubbling over” to “maintain a state of tension that suits the Netanyahu coalition.

“Netanyahu requires this because he needs the Israeli population to be in a state of turmoil, of fear, that keeps him out of the courtroom, away from his trial, and with an ambition to alter the map of the Middle East and to demonstrate that he, his legacy, is one that leaves Israel as the dominant regional actor,” Doyle said.

“Of course, in doing this, he is risking going to war in Lebanon, in Palestine, Iran, and all the unforeseen consequences that war typically involves. And he’s now stuck in this eternal conflict cycle and doesn’t have an easy way out in which he can deliver on the objectives that he set.”

Whatever Netanyahu’s motivations, other analysts are skeptical that territorial expansion will deliver the security that Israel desires.

Hussein Chokr, a Beirut-based policy expert, said Israel is “stumbling in its search for security” and “does not seem to know how to secure itself.”

Like Doyle, he said the expansion would likely bring more violence, not more security.


“Further Israeli advances in Syria, for example, will make Turkiye feel that its national security is under threat, as Israel moves closer to its southern border,” Chokr told Arab News. “The same applies to Egypt in relation to Gaza.

“This will increase the likelihood of friction and deepen tensions, laying the groundwork for further rounds of violence that neither peace agreements nor normalization with these two states will necessarily prevent.”

To make that case, Chokr pointed to history.

“In the past, (Israel) believed that occupying surrounding territories, whether in Gaza or southern Lebanon, would bring it security. It did not, (and) Israel eventually withdrew under the pressure of resistance.

“Today, it is attempting the same approach once again, while sending a message first to the states on its borders and then to the wider region, that it is prepared to pursue destruction, killing, and even the occupation of territory prohibited under international law in order to feel secure.

“The region’s states will interpret this expansion collectively as a project of domination, while each will also assess it individually according to its own geopolitical implications.”

Israel occupied the Gaza Strip after the 1967 Six-Day War and carried out a unilateral disengagement in 2005. Israeli settlers were removed in August of that year, and the military completed its withdrawal from inside Gaza in September 2005.

In Lebanon, Israel invaded in 1982 and, after a partial pullback in 1985, maintained a “security zone” in the south with the South Lebanon Army as an allied force during the civil war — before withdrawing entirely on May 24, 2000.

The Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah was credited with pushing Israeli troops out.

Hezbollah emerged from militias formed in southern Lebanon to resist Israel’s 1982 invasion. Far from destroying the group, many observers believe Israeli attacks have strengthened Hezbollah politically, as it presents itself as the protector of the south.

Until today, Hezbollah has refused to disarm, citing Israel’s continued attacks and presence on Lebanese territory.

Israeli officials say the buffer zones follow sustained cross-border attacks, including the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 assault from Gaza, near-daily Hezbollah rocket and drone fire from Lebanon, and periodic strikes or attempted infiltrations from Syrian territory.

They argue the expanded security belts are intended to push armed groups farther from Israel’s borders and reduce the risk of incursions, anti-tank fire, and short-range rocket attacks on civilian communities.

Although Hezbollah has reportedly been weakened since Israel’s military escalation in September 2024, which killed former leader Hassan Nasrallah, the group was able to launch an attack on northern Israel on March 2 in retaliation for joint US-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28 on Iran.

This latest conflict has killed at least 3,700 people in Lebanon and displaced more than 1.2 million, according to official figures. No reliable public count has emerged for newly displaced Israelis since March 2, though reporting points to continued temporary sheltering.


In Gaza, Israel occupies more than 60 percent of the territory, Reuters reported. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli attacks have killed at least 73,000 people in the enclave, repeatedly displaced about 90 percent of the population, and rendered entire neighborhoods uninhabitable.

Meanwhile in Syria, the Israeli military has moved into the UN-patrolled buffer zone in the Golan Heights, exploiting the security vacuum immediately after President Bashar Assad’s removal in December 2024, and now controls the summit of Mount Hermon.

Israeli officials say the new Syrian government and other armed groups active in the country remain potential threats. In March 2025, Katz said the military “is prepared to stay in Syria for an unlimited amount of time.

“We will hold the security area in Hermon and make sure that all the security zone in southern Syria is demilitarized and clear of weapons and threats,” he said during a visit to the summit.

Israel has also carried out incursions into Syria’s southwestern Quneitra province, according to media reports.

On May 14, Amnesty International condemned what it called Israel’s “deliberate destruction of civilian homes” there since December 2024, saying the actions “should be investigated as war crimes.”

Amnesty reported that over the six months from Dec. 8, 2024, the Israeli military damaged or destroyed at least 23 civilian structures in three villages, displacing entire families.

Taken together, these campaigns point to what critics describe as an occupation-centered strategy that is deepening, not easing, regional instability. Chokr said Israel’s “occupation-driven approach will not bring it security.

“(Israel’s) crisis does not originate in its surroundings,” he said. “It is rooted in the nature of its own settler-colonial and exclusionary project, which struggles to accept coexistence with those who are neither Jewish nor Zionist unless they are rendered sufficiently weak.”

That strategy, Chokr argued, is also foreclosing diplomatic alternatives. He said Israel’s “expansionist policies” would push neighboring states “away from the collective Arab solution embodied in the Beirut Arab Peace Initiative.

“It is effectively forcing them to choose between submission to military pressure and the pursuit of unilateral agreements similar to Camp David,” he said.

Under the Camp David framework and the subsequent 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, Israel agreed to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula in stages, culminating in a complete military and civilian pullout.

As part of this process, all Israeli settlements in Sinai were evacuated and demolished, and military bases dismantled, despite strong resistance from many settlers and their supporters.

“Such agreements may eventually return some of the territories Israel is taking from them today. But they will not return the territories occupied in 1967, nor resolve the Palestinian question (but marginalizing it), nor prevent the cycle of violence from recurring.”

The Arab Peace Initiative, adopted by the Arab League at its Beirut summit in March 2002, offered Israel full normalization with Arab states in exchange for a full withdrawal from territories occupied since 1967, acceptance of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and an agreed solution to the Palestinian refugee issue.

Chokr said the Arab and Muslim worlds “will not accept a Palestinian question abandoned to its fate.

“Yet any renewed demand for Palestinian rights appears to alarm the current Israeli state, with its increasingly exclusionary and settler-colonial character, prompting it to repeat the same policies it is pursuing now and has pursued before, the occupation of additional territory, as happened in 1967, 1978, and 1982.”

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