ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Syria on Tuesday condemned as "illegal" a visit by the Israeli defense minister to Israeli-occupied territory in southern Syria, calling it a "flagrant violation of the country's sovereignty" and urging action from the international community.

Defense Minister Israel Katz earlier in the day visited Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Shaykh) in Syria's Quneitra province, which contains areas that have been occupied by Israeli troops since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad government in December 2024, with Katz himself having ordered the occupation of the 1974 buffer zone in the Golan Heights, separating the two states, amid the post-revolutionary confusion.

Speaking to soldiers during the visit, which was not coordinated with Syrian authorities, Katz appeared to openly taunt Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, saying, "The message to the Syrian president is clear: When you wake up in the morning in the palace in Damascus and look up at Mount Hermon and see the [Israeli military], you know that we are here to protect our communities and our border."

"We will not move from Mount Hermon and the security zone as long as there are jihadist threats to the State of Israel," he continued.

The Syrian foreign ministry responded with a statement saying "these hostile practices constitute a clear provocation and a violation of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, and a breach of the obligations of the 1974 Disengagement Agreement, which requires respect for the ceasefire lines and non-crossing them."

"The Syrian Arab Republic calls upon the international community to assume its legal and political responsibilities and take the necessary measures to compel the occupying authorities to cease these repeated violations, withdraw immediately and completely from the Syrian territories into which the occupying forces have penetrated, return to the disengagement line, and respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic."

The incident comes a week after Israeli forces bombed a Syrian airbase in Idlib on August 18 with the alleged motivation of preventing the deployment of Turkish troops at the site, a claim that Ankara vehemently dismissed as "frivilous".

US Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack denounced the strikes as an "unnecessary escalation," asserting that "the [Syrian] government has neither adopted a predatory posture nor maintained proxy forces. It has, in fact, repeatedly indicated a preference for de-escalation with Israel."

Tensions between Turkey and Israel have increasingly escalated in recent years, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's outspoken condemnation of Israel's genocidal Gaza campaign having underlined the two regional powers' rival bids for greater influence in the Middle East.

The current government of Ahmed al-Sharaa rose to power after ousting former leader Bashar al-Assad in a Turkish-backed offensive in December 2024, with Ankara having since maintaining intimate ties with the new administration in Damascus.

Since the fall of Assad, Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria - ostensibly with the goal of destroying arms caches and protecting the country's Druze minority - and occupied Syrian territory, making repeated incursions into border areas.