KIBBUTZ EL-ROM — The swath of land that once made up part of a closed military zone separating Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights is a desolate landscape full of rocks, grasses, and land mines.

Since the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and until recently, the Israeli side of the border had been restricted to the military, said Shimon Michael, head of the emergency response team of nearby Kibbutz El-Rom. He recently drove The Times of Israel to the border on a mild autumn day.

Dotted with apple orchards and wind turbines that rotated in the breeze, the bumpy dirt road continued through what is known as the Valley of Tears. There, 175 IDF tanks somehow managed to hold back 700 Syrian tanks, preventing them from breaking through the Israeli border during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Michael, 38, said that before the October 7, 2023, full-scale invasion of southern Israel, in which Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw 251 hostages abducted into the Gaza Strip, he lived with the illusion that the Syrian border “was the quietest border in Israel.”

“But the October 7 massacre changed the idea that nothing could happen to us,” Michael said.

On October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas massacre, the Iran-backed Lebanese terror group Hezbollah began to launch near-daily missile and drone attacks from Lebanon, forcing the displacement of some 60,000 residents in northern Israel, until the November 27, 2024, ceasefire.

Although residents of the Golan Heights were not evacuated, “our mentality suddenly changed,” Michael said.

Before, as the manager of El-Rom’s boutique hotel, Michael concentrated on visitors’ events and planting gardens with specimen trees and lush flowers. After the start of the war, he headed the emergency response team, which became equipped and “ready to fight in 10 minutes.”

This drive marked the first time that he and another El-Rom emergency response team member, Gal Fitusi, traveled as far as the border fence along Syria. They stared at the nearby Syrian village of Al-Hamidiya.

The village is located inside the buffer zone between Israel and Syria. With the UN still present in the region, the IDF occupied the buffer zone upon the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December 2024.

“In the weeks after al-Assad fell… it was the only time we were scared,” said Fitusi.

The IDF has been deployed to nine posts in the area since, and is operating in areas up to 15 kilometers (nine miles) deep into Syria.

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