Quneitra Governorate is one of the fourteen governorates (provinces) of Syria. It is situated in southern Syria, and is notable for officially including the Israel-occupied Golan Heights, which make up the majority of its area. The governorate borders the countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, and the Syrian governorates of Daraa and Rif Dimashq. Its area varies, according to different sources, from 685 km2 to 1,861 km2. The governorate had a population of 87,000 at the 2010 estimate. The nominal capital is the now abandoned city of Quneitra, destroyed by Israel before their withdrawal in June 1974 in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War; since 1986, the de facto capital is Madinat al-Salam.
During the Syrian civil war, most of the portions of the governorate that are not held by Israel were taken by various opposition and jihadist forces. In the summer of 2018, the rebel-held areas in the governorate were retaken by the Syrian government.
Following the 2024 Syrian opposition offensives, the resurgent Southern Front declared full control over the governorate (excluding Israeli-controlled areas). Later, Israel advanced its troops into the buffer zone amid reports of artillery strikes on local villages.
History
The area surrounding Quneitra has been inhabited for millennia. Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are thought to have lived there, as evidenced by the discovery of Levallois and Mousterian flint tools in the vicinity.Takeru Akazawa, Kenichi Aoki, Ofer Bar-Yosef, Neanderthals and Modern Humans in Western Asia, p. 154. Springer, 1998. A settlement was established at least as early as the late Hellenistic period, and continued through the Roman and Byzantine times; it was known by the name "Sarisai". The settlement served as a stop on the road from Damascus to western Palestine. Saint Paul is said to have passed through the settlement on his way from Jerusalem to Damascus. The site of the Conversion of Paul was traditionally identified with the small village of Kokab, north-east of Quneitra, on the road to Damascus.Ivan Mannheim, "Biblical Damascus", in Syria & Lebanon Handbook, p. 100. 2001, Footprint Travel Guides.
Transhumance shaped settlement in the Golan for centuries because of the region's harsh winters. The winters "forced tribespeople until the 19th century to live in hundreds of rudimentary 'winter villages' in their tribal territory. Starting in the second part of the 19th century, the villages became "fixed and formed the nucleus of fully sedentary life in the 20th century Golan."Roy Marom, “Sukayk and al-Summāqah: Mamluk Rural Geography in the Northern Jawlān/Golan Heights in the Light of Qāytbāy’s Endowment Deeds,” in Kate Raphael and Mustafa Abbasi (ed.s), The Golan in the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods: an Archaeological and Historical Study: Excavations at Naʿarān and Farj, In Honour of Moshe Hartal, Yigal Ben Ephraim and Shuqri ‘Arraf, Annual of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion Volume xiv (2024): 69-70.
The governorate was established in 1964 by the merger of Quneitra District, which belonged to Rif Dimashq Governorate and Fiq District which belonged to Daraa Governorate. The reason for the establishment of this new governorate was the necessity to govern the Golan Heights as a single administrative unit due to its strategic and military importance along the borders with the newly established State of Israel.
Six-Day War Most of the governorate was occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. The deserted city remained in Israeli hands for the next six years. However, Israel and Syria remained in a state of war throughout this period (and, indeed, to the present day). The town gained a fresh symbolic value; it was seen by the Syrians as "the badge of Syria's defeat, an emblem of hatred between Syria and Israel and a cross [Syrian President Hafez al-Assad] had to bear."Seale, Patrick. (1988). Asad of Syria: The struggle for the Middle East (p. 141). Berkeley: University of California Press
Yom Kippur War During the first few days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Quneitra was briefly recaptured by the Syrian Army before it was repulsed in an Israeli counter-offensive."Tables turned on Arabs, Israel general says". The Times, 9 October 1973, p. 8 In mid-October 1973, the Israeli counter-offensive started. Syrians forces had massed nearly 1,000 tanks along a front. Israeli forces responded with a large scale armoured attack against the Syrians. Although the Syrians initially retreated, they later counterattacked and pushed back into occupied territory. Quneitra changed hands several times during the fighting. Israeli armored units, supported by Phantoms and Skyhawk fighter jets conducting close air support and napalm strikes against forward Syrian positions eventually halted the Syrian advance and forced the Syrian Army to retreat.
Destruction of the city A group of settlers from Merom Golan – a settlement established in 1967 – took over an abandoned bunker in Quneitra and declared it to be a new settlement called Keshet (Quneitra in Hebrew). The settlers also set about razing the existing town to the ground. The leader of Merom Golan, Yehuda Harel, and another Merom Golan member, Shimshon Wollner, initiated the destruction of Quneitra, which was carried out by the Land Development Administration of the Jewish National Fund. Harel later described what happened:
Wollner and Harel asked the Jewish National Fund to carry out the work, ostensibly to prepare an area for agricultural cultivation, but were refused as they did not have permission from the Israeli army. They then approached the Assistant to the Head of Northern Command and asked him to mark on a map which buildings the army needed. According to Harel,
The buildings were systematically stripped,"Qunaytirah, Al-." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. with anything movable being removed and sold to Israeli contractors, before they were pulled apart with tractors and bulldozers.Lara Dunston, Terry Carter, Andrew Humphreys. Syria & Lebanon, p. 129. Lonely Planet, 2004.
The disengagement went into force on 6 June."Israel-Syrian disengagement goes into effect today after detailed plan is signed in Geneva". The Times, 6 June 1974, p. 6 On 26 June, the Syrian president Hafez al-Assad travelled to Quneitra where he pledged to return the rest of the occupied territories to Syrian control."Egypt offers air force to defend Lebanon". The Times, 26 June 1974, p. 6 Western reporters accompanied Syrian refugees returning to the city in early July 1974 and described what they saw on the ground. Time magazine's correspondent reported that "Most of its buildings are knocked flat, as though by dynamite, or pockmarked by shellfire." Le Mondes Syria correspondent, in a report for The Times, gave a detailed eyewitness description of the destruction:
Today the city is unrecognisable. The houses with their roofs lying on the ground look like gravestones. Parts of the rubble are covered with fresh earth furrowed by bulldozer tracks. Everywhere there are fragments of furniture, discarded kitchen utensils, Hebrew newspapers dating from the first week of June; here a ripped-up mattress, there the springs of an old sofa. On the few sections of wall still standing, Hebrew inscriptions proclaim: "There'll be another round"; "You want Quneitra, you'll have it destroyed.""Golan's capital turns into heap of stones". The Times, 10 July 1974, p. 8
Israel asserted that most of the damage had been caused in the two wars and during the artillery duels in between."Israel fears Russian incitement of Arabs". The Times, 8 September 1975 Several reports from before the withdrawal did refer to the city as "ruined" and "shell-scarred"."Syrian 160mm mortar shells were falling on the northern side of the city, a shell-scarred ghost city since its capture by the Israelis in 1967". "Debris of two armies litters Damascus road". The Times, 5 October 1973"Kuneitra, the ruined capital of the Heights". "Village life on the wild frontier of the Golan". The Times, 5 April 1974"The officer conceded that the ruined city itself was of no military importance to Israel." "Israel sees no end to Golan battle". The Times, 2 May 1974. The Times''' correspondent saw the city for himself on 6 May, a month before the Israeli withdrawal, and described it as being "in ruins and deserted after seven years of war and dereliction. It looks like a wild west city struck by an earthquake and if the Syrians get it back they will face a major feat of reconstruction. Nearly every building is heavily damaged and scores have collapsed.""Settlers insist Israel keeps Golan". The Times, 7 May 1974, p. 6
Direct evidence of the city's condition was provided when it was filmed on 12 May 1974 by a British television news team which included the veteran journalist Peter Snow, who was reporting for Independent Television News on the disengagement negotiations. His report was broadcast on ITN's News at Ten programme. According to The Times correspondent Edward Mortimer, "viewers were thus afforded a panoramic view of the city, which had stood almost completely empty since the Syrian army evacuated it in 1967. It could be seen that many of the buildings were damaged, but most of them were still standing." After it was handed over, "very few buildings were left standing. Most of those destroyed did not present the jagged outline and random heaps of rubble usually produced by artillery or aerial bombardment. The roofs lay flat on the ground, 'pancaked' in a manner which I am told can only be achieved by systematic dynamiting of the support walls inside." Mortimer concluded that the footage "establishes beyond reasonable doubt that much of the destruction took place after 12 May—at a time when there was no fighting anywhere near Kuneitra.""A question mark over the death of a city." The Times, 17 February 1975, p. 12
The United Nations established a Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, which engaged a Swiss engineer Edward Gruner to investigate the damage.UN Secretary General: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories; including Edward Gruner: Quneitra Report on Nature, Extent and Value of Damage. A/31/218 1 October 1976 Gruner and a team of surveyors spent four months in Quneitra, documenting every building and its condition. His report concluded that Israeli forces had deliberately destroyed the city prior to their withdrawal, including almost 4,000 buildings and a large amount of infrastructure, of value estimated at 463 million Syrian pounds. The report's conclusions were subsequently adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. It passed a resolution on 29 November 1974 describing the destruction of Quneitra as "a grave breach of the [Fourth] Geneva Convention" and "condemn[ing] Israel for such acts," by a margin of 93 votes to 8, with 74 abstentions."Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories ", United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3240, 29 November 1974, A/RES/3240, unispal . The United Nations Commission on Human Rights also voted to condemn the "deliberate destruction and devastation" of Quneitra in a resolution of 22 February 1975, by a margin of 22 votes to one (the United States) with nine abstentions."Human Rights Commission condemns Israel". The Times, 22 February 1975
1990s