Two Israeli army tanks passed through a gate in a thick fence onto a dirt track winding through pastel-toned hills. The residents of Majdal Shams, a Druze village in the north of the Golan Heights, occupied by the Israeli army since 1967, looked on in amazement. "We haven't seen Israeli forces operating over there since 1973 and the Yom Kippur War," said Wassim Safadi, a local journalist.

"Over there" is the zone of separation between the part controlled by Israel and Syria, set up in 1974, and where some 1,000 soldiers belonging to the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) are deployed. Even before Bashar al-Assad fled and the Syrian regime collapsed on Sunday, December 8, Israeli troops crossed the demarcation line marked by a fence. The movement continued on Sunday morning when the Syrian security forces collapsed.

Rowaida Hamad, the mother of a Druze family born in Damascus and married to another Druze man from Majdal Shams, came to stand on the so-called "megaphone" traffic median below the town. It is from this spot that families from the religious minority, divided between Syria, Lebanon and Israel, exchange information across the separation barrier with their relatives living on the other side. On Wednesday afternoon, December 11, many of them were anxious for news.

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