Stealing Syrian Oil from Occupied Golan

By the beginning of the year 2015, the Zionist entity, without the least legal framework, kicked off operations to extract and steal oil from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and the United Nations as usual remains short of even condemning this aggression.

The new Israeli crime came in less than a month after an Israeli court had given the green light to the Israeli “Afek Oil and Gas” firm to start ”without hesitation” what it called “exploratory drilling” in several sites in occupied Golan, despite appeals by environment activists demanding halting the drilling because it poses serious threat to natural resources. The court, by doing so, didn’t take into consideration that the Golan Heights is still an occupied Syrian land and that digging for oil in an occupied territory is an illegal act against international laws and conventions which were made supposedly to protect and preserve people’s rights in their occupied land and natural resources. 

Needless to say, the aggression goes in line with the crimes being committed against the Syrian people by the armed terrorist takfiri groups, which have been getting all forms of Israeli support including logistic and medical help to fight the Syrian government. It reveals Israel’s intention to exploit the current circumstances in the region and the ongoing events in Syria to perpetuate its occupation and annexation of the Syrian Golan.

The provocative procedure also goes in harmony with the EU sanctions on the Syrian people and with attempts to facilitate the passing of the Syrian oil stolen by the foreign-backed terrorist groups into European markets with the help of the Turkish regime of the Justice and Development Party, aiming to destroy the Syrian economy and serve the Zionist-American hegemony scheme in the Middle East.

Israel has been planning to steal the Syrian oil for years. In February 2013, Syria warned in letters to the UN and the Security Council that the Israeli occupation authorities’ permission to an American company to drill oil in the occupied Syrian Golan was a blatant violation of the Security Council Resolutions.

The United Nations, early in December 2014, urged Israel to comply with international resolutions relating to the occupied Syrian Golan, particularly the Security Council Resolution No. 497 of 1981 which considered the occupation’s acts of imposing its laws as well as judicial and administrative mandate over the land of the occupied Syrian Golan as null and void and as having no international legal ground, but Israel gave no heed to these resolutions and okayed stealing the Syrian Golan oil.

The Israeli project in the occupied Golan stirs no astonishment as the Zionist entity in cooperation with US companies has been committing such crimes for years in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories aiming to dominate energy resources in the region amid the suspicious silence by the UN.

Reports from Lebanon revealed that the Zionists have started stealing gas from the Lebanese regional waters. Also in occupied Palestine, the Israeli occupation authorities amended the path of the apartheid separation wall in a West Bank village to include an area where oil is available as to drill and steal the Palestinian oil and gas.

According to media reports, “Afek Oil and Gas”, the firm carrying out oil drilling in the occupied Golan, is a subsidiary of “Genie Israel” company which is run by retired Israeli General Effi Eitam, who once declared Palestinians “creatures who came out of the depths of darkness,” and that Israel would eventually have to kill them all. The company also has a strategic advisory board that includes American media mogul Rupert Murdoch and several well-connected international individuals, including former US Vice President Dick Cheney.

Waiting for the international community to wake up, regain credibility and be able to force Israel to comply with its resolutions, the Syrians will keep confronting all schemes aiming at confiscating their legitimate rights and at violating their sovereignty over their natural resources in the occupied Golan.

Hamda Mustafa