After years of war and widespread upheaval, one corner of the Middle East has fundamentally changed.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed, and many multiples more injured and displaced.
The devastating chain of events has resulted in the map of the region being redrawn, mostly shaped by the decisions of one country and enforcement by its military.
The Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed around 1,200 people and resulted in 251 people being taken hostage.
It triggered a ferocious and grinding war in Gaza as Hamas and its partners were pursued for their crimes, and the explosion of fighting in Lebanon as Hezbollah opened fire on Israel in solidarity with Palestinians.
Large military operations were launched in the West Bank and an opportunity was seized in Syria after the collapse of a decades-long dictatorship in late 2024.
The official justification was security, and the need to insulate Israel and Israelis by carving out so-called buffer or security zones — including inside the borders of neighbouring sovereign nations.
The new lines across the map have taken different forms: rubble, gates, cement blocks, check points and, in Syria, a trench.
The ABC has reviewed satellite imagery, government documents and maps, and has spoken to people in the communities enveloped by this situation to understand the impact of Israel’s conduct.
Analysis of Israeli military positions, buffer zones and settlement plans since October 2023 has found Israel now controls at least 2,490 square kilometres of territory across Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank.
It is an area approximately the size of the Australian Capital Territory.
That reality on the ground has fueled deeper concerns among critics of Israel, given the country has never explicitly defined its borders.
There are some extreme, religious elements of Israeli society which rely on passages in the Old Testament to suggest the country should have a claim over a massive swathe of the Middle East.
But the more mainstream view, including that held by the governing Likud Party, is that Israel should include all of biblical Judea and Samaria — roughly correlating to the current West Bank — and perhaps also parts of Gaza.
At the very least, Israel’s government has said it will not allow the creation of a Palestinian state.
It says it is fighting for survival as it redraws the map. Those directly in Israel’s sights argue it is simply pursuing its own territorial ambitions.
Between Alpha and Bravo
There is an area on the border of Lebanon and Syria where Israel’s so-called security strategy appears to culminate.
As two buffer zones meet, the IDF secures a vantage point on Mount Hermon that looks over Syria’s capital, Damascus, and into Lebanon.
For decades, this area was a demilitarised zone patrolled by United Nations forces. But that has now changed, and it began with a trench.
In August 2024, construction of this 5-metre-wide trench began.
Most of the world considers the trench to be in Syria.
But the military responsible for digging it is Israel.
In the first months of construction, the expansion of the trench followed what is known as the Alpha Line — the border between the occupied Golan Heights, which was annexed by Israel in 1981, and a demilitarised buffer zone.
For 50 years, UN forces patrolled the buffer zone. To the west was the Alpha Line, which the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were supposed to stay behind. To the east was the Bravo line, which Syrian forces could not cross.
In December 2024, Syria changed. Nearly 14 years of civil war came to an end as rebel forces prevailed, and dictator Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus for a rumoured life of exile in Russia.
In the months that followed, satellite imagery showed that Israel’s strategy in the region began to change.
The construction of Israel’s trench moved further into the buffer zone and, in some areas, the gutter appears to dissect Syrian towns, analysis of satellite imagery shows.
The IDF did not respond to the ABC’s request for comment on the specific justification for digging the trench. It replied with a general comment that it operates in southern Syria to protect Israel and Israelis.
The military has also been constructing military bases deeper inside the buffer zone and beyond it.
Of the nine bases identified by conflict monitors and visible in ABC analysis of satellite imagery, the IDF now has three bases inside Syria, beyond the Bravo Line.
The Israeli military has launched increasingly sustained and entrenched activity inside Syria, saying it had carried out strikes in support of the Druze. The ethnic minority lives across parts of Syria, Israel and Lebanon, and some see Israel as protectors.
It also said it attacked positions where “projectiles” had been launched into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
The Office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recently reported ground incursions, patrols, raids and searches are routinely happening, and noted the IDF had “detained 49 individuals, including two children” on Syrian territory.
The IDF told the ABC it had found weapons, “thwarted” smuggling rings, and detained “suspects involved in advancing terrorist activities”, claiming it operates in accordance with international law.
“It has become like the old security services under Bashar al-Assad, when his forces used to raid houses in the middle of the night while people were asleep,” Syrian Malik Hussein Ibrahim said.
The ABC met Mr Ibrahim in July at his village Abdin, a Sunni village in the southernmost point of Syria.
It is less than 1.5 kilometres away from the Bravo line where residents said they were forced to defend themselves and their homes with rocks and sticks.
“Now the Israeli army comes to search,” he said.
“Search for what? We have no weapons, nothing. We only have sticks. We didn’t shoot at them or point weapons at them.
“We are simple villagers. We make our living by farming, growing wheat, barley, and tomatoes. That’s our life.”
Analysis of local reporting, videos and images from alleged instances of Israeli incursions into Syria reveals how the IDF presence on the ground has been escalating.
During one incident in June, a Syrian television crew was fired upon by Israeli forces as they reported on the IDF’s presence near Abdin.
“I was wearing my press flak jacket, together with Ayman the cameraman. We were standing right here when they opened fire directly at us,” Youssef Hariri from Syrian state broadcaster Al-Ikhbariya told the ABC.
“We were among residential homes. We left the village to prevent the situation from escalating and the gunfire from turning into shelling, although they continued firing at us for more than 10 minutes.”
The IDF told the ABC a resident of Abdin had opened fire on soldiers, prompting them to fire back.
Youssef Hariri said he did not see or hear anyone firing at the IDF from the village before they shot at him and his colleague.
“No, not at all. We were journalists, and it was just me and the cameraman. As you can see in the video, we were surrounded by children. We were covering the incursion into the area … when the soldiers began firing directly at us.”
From the fall of Assad until mid-August this year, there were more than 1,060 reports of ground incursions into Syria by Israeli military forces, collected and collated by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).
Mapping the incursion reports shows a cluster in the south-western corner of Syria, with one reported IDF ground operation 60 kilometres beyond the Bravo line inside Syria.
ACLED Syria analyst Muaz Al Abdullah told the ABC while UN forces remained in the buffer zone, it was no longer effective in preventing the Israeli incursions in the Syrian territories.
“The buffer zone no longer exists. It has become an area with full Israeli control,”
he said.
In August, the UN also reported Israel continued to occupy the zone, which is approximately 234 square kilometres of territory.
Together with the occupied Golan Heights, which most countries including Australia do not recognise as Israeli territory, Israel controls approximately 1,453 square kilometres of Syrian territory.
At the end of August, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the IDF would “not move from Mount Hermon and the security zone” as long as there were what he perceived as threats.
Israel’s movements in Syria are just one part of its security zone strategy and the ground it controls there is only part of the picture.
Bureaucracy and secret cabinet decisions
Security, or buffer zones, can be relatively simple to define on a map. For the most part, these are the actions of the military.
In the occupied West Bank, the question of how much land Israel has taken over is more complicated.
There are a few key considerations.
First, the land being turned into official settlements where Israelis can live legally according to their own government — sometimes retrospectively, after the communities are established.
Secondly, the amount of land Palestinian people have been expelled from or prevented from accessing.
Settlements in the occupied West Bank are Israeli residential communities established on land that most of the world, including Australia, recognises as Palestinian. Land that would be central to any future Palestinian state.
All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law — in 2024 an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice affirmed this — but Israel has attempted to legitimise them within its own legal system.
It is a highly controversial approach and has been labelled by human rights organisations and UN bodies as de facto annexation. It is a system built for Israelis.
East Jerusalem, seized by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967, has been annexed.
The ABC found 273 development and planning applications lodged in the last three years with the Israel planning authority for “Judea and Samaria”, the name Israel uses for the West Bank. Of those the ABC could only find one that was rejected.
In recent years, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has bypassed even its own processes to rapidly approve settlements.
His government has moved away from funnelling decisions on settlements via Israeli bureaucratic channels. Instead it has approved groups of new settlements via sometimes secret cabinet decisions.
In an April cabinet decision, 34 new settlements were approved. A year earlier, the cabinet approved 22 new settlements. One of them was Marom Yehuda.
Just off Route 60, north of Hebron in the West Bank, a gate has changed everything.
One of the main entrances to the Palestinian town of Halhul is regularly closed to traffic by a large orange gate.
It forces residents to make massive detours through other towns and villages to access their homes. Trucks carrying freight often park on one side of the gate and unload their cargo underneath it and then reload into waiting trucks on the other side.
Muhammad Husain Ismail Mereab, 76, has run an auto shop and café near the gate for the last 20 years.
“This gate has no specific opening times. Sometimes they open it, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they open it but they erect a checkpoint,” he said.
Muhammad’s house was behind his workshop, but he said some of his land was suddenly seized by Israeli authorities when they claimed it was needed to “expand roads in the area”.
“They bulldozed it, including the vines, to prepare it to be used for the new road,” he said. “We asked them to wait until we could harvest and eat from the trees but they refused.”
On the other side of Route 60 from Halhul, it is a very different story.
A former illegal community, something called an outpost, has been transformed into a settlement that has now been approved under Israeli law.
It is called Marom Yehuda and to celebrate the new designation and construction at the site, settlers and supporters held a “family fair”.
Alongside the bouncing castles, pizza ovens and child entertainers, bulldozers had carved new roads into the hillside among the temporary demountable buildings placed at the site.
The legalisation of Marom Yehuda was a triumph for the settler movement. At the fair, it signalled its intentions to go far further, displaying banners promoting settlement in Gaza.
The event was sponsored by Nachala, the most prominent settler organisation.
Nachala’s outspoken far-right founder Daniella Weiss, now subject to sanctions by the European Union for promoting settlements and the displacement of Palestinians, was the star speaker.
She called this moment “a turning point in history”, vowing people she considered to have committed “crimes against the Jewish nation” would be removed from Gaza.
“It might take some time but not a lot of time,” Weiss said.
When asked whether the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank amounted to ethnic cleansing Weiss deflected and said “you can call it any name you want”.
Nachala has close ties to the Likud and other parties in the governing coalition, and has the idea of Greater Israel at the very heart of its identity.
The organisation’s logo takes the biblical notion of the promised land and applies it to the idea of Jewish settlement.
In the past, the Zionist right-wing maps of Greater Israel were limited to British Palestine and the Kingdom of Jordan. Today the logo of Nachala includes a map of not only that territory but also all of Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, all of Lebanon, most of Syria and parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
Under the current Netanyahu government, often referred to as the most right-wing in the State of Israel’s history and including some of the most vocal proponents of Israeli settlements in its ministerial ranks, the idea of Greater Israel, in the broader sense of the word, has been thrust into the spotlight given its members have been more publicly engaging with Nachala’s activities and advocacy in the open.
That prompts obvious questions to allies, including the United States.
When asked if he supported the concept of Greater Israel, the Trump administration’s ambassador to Israel and evangelical Christian Mike Huckabee told American commentator Tucker Carlson “it would be fine if they took it all”.
That is not the official position of the United States. Huckabee later added it was a “hyperbolic statement”.
Comments like the ambassador’s, along with Israel’s recent seizure of land on security grounds, have emboldened some to push for a small part of that biblical vision — even if the full scope of the idea remains a work of scripture rather than geographic reality.
According to boundaries advertised on a real estate listing, the settlement of Marom Yehuda covers about 0.59 square kilometres of land.
“Sitting here … C area is legal … that is not a Palestinian so-called land, that’s not a private land, C area … are the regions within Judea and Samaria that are Israel sovereignty, OK?” Amichai Chikli, a minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party, told the ABC at the fair day.
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What the minister means is the land where Marom Yehuda has been established is part of Area C — the part of the occupied West Bank Israel considers under its control.
Under the Oslo Accords, the attempt to chart a course for a two-state solution in the early 1990s, the West Bank was divided into areas A, B and C.
But as each new settlement is approved by Israel, another parcel of land is effectively brought into Israeli-controlled Area C.
After the last couple of years, there are now almost 240 settlements, according to ABC analysis.
That includes 104 approved by Netanyahu’s cabinet since 2023, according to Israeli-based human rights advocacy organisation Peace Now.
Before an area becomes a settlement, it is sometimes an illegal outpost or farm — an unofficial Israeli community built without government approval.
These outposts are often later legalised.
ABC analysis has found there are now at least another 366 outposts across the West Bank.
A conservative estimate of the area now seized by approved settlements or unapproved outposts is 168 square kilometres of the occupied West Bank. That figure is based on data compiled by two Israeli human rights organisations and checked against Israeli real estate listings, public services and rezoning applications.
That includes at least 23 square kilometres of land that has been claimed as Israeli since 2023. This area calculation accounts for about two thirds of the newly approved settlements because the ABC was unable to source detailed mapping of the remaining applications.
Also contributing to the increase in territory is the expansion of existing settlements.
ABC analysis of planning records found 80 settlements were given expansion approvals since October 2023.
Some were given approval to expand as many as 15 times.
What this all means is Palestinian land is shrinking across the occupied West Bank. Farm by farm, village by village, Palestinians are being physically expelled or blocked from their land and often their livelihoods.
Since 2023, Israel has partially or totally expelled 82 Palestinian villages or communities, according to Israel-based advocacy organisation B’Tselem.
That is more than 4,800 people.
On the edge of Halhul, a pile of rubble sits across a road through vines and fields that was used by Palestinian landowners to access their farms.
Anas Abumayyaleh, who runs a medical equipment supplier on the edge of town, claimed the IDF was responsible for the pile of dirt and debris that appeared soon after an illegal outpost was established up the hill in October last year.
Settlers from that outpost — some barely adults — launch attacks on the local Palestinian community, racing down the hillside in buggies armed with sticks and rocks.
“The owner of these lands, they tried to cross this barrier and to visit their lands,” Mr Abumayyaleh said.
“When they went there, the settlers came down and they sprayed them with the pepper gas and they attacked them with sticks, they threw rocks.
“Some of the settlers had weapons, that’s why the Palestinians got scared of them because they have their weapons … [the Palestinians] don’t have anything to protect them.”
The IDF told the ABC it “strongly condemns” settler violence and soldiers were “required to act to stop the violation and, when necessary, detain or arrest suspects until the police arrive at the scene”.
In response to claims the IDF is complicit in protecting the settlers or turning a blind eye to their conduct, it claimed it investigated any soldiers who “fail to comply” with orders.
It denied knowledge of the road block.
In early September the Netanyahu government ordered the dismantling of up to 100 unsanctioned outposts. It has not been announced when the operation to remove the illegal sites would begin.
Weeks ago, far-right, pro-settler Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich heralded what he called a “settlement revolution” in the West Bank and said he wants it to go further — declaring there needed to be a war in the territory so Israel can “do there what we did in Gaza”.
The yellow lines
The Israeli territory gain in the occupied West Bank can be gradual — a bureaucratic grind that is steadily consuming land the international community, including Australia, recognises as Palestinian.
In Lebanon, however, Israel has moved much faster.
Now there is more than 600 square kilometres of territory inside Lebanon under Israeli control, a figure that accounts for 6 per cent of the country.
The IDF still occupies this land while a ceasefire is in place. The complexity is that Lebanon and Israel are party to the ceasefire, but Lebanon itself is not party to the war.
Hezbollah, which Australia have proscribed as a terrorist organisation, have rejected talks and have refused to disarm.
Fighting is ongoing.
Hezbollah is backed by the Iranian regime and fired rockets into Israel in response to the assassination of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei three days into the US and Israel’s war against Tehran.
It all but mirrored the approach when the group fired at Israel in solidarity with Hamas after the October 7 attacks on Israel triggered the war in Gaza.
Within days of the Iran war beginning, the IDF launched a widespread ground invasion in southern Lebanon.
The IDF issued so-called evacuation orders, widely regarded by the Lebanese population as forced displacement orders, for large swathes of southern Lebanon — particularly the area south of the Litani River traditionally considered to be Hezbollah’s heartland.
The displacement in Lebanon’s south, combined with the bombings in the capital Beirut, displaced more than 1 million Lebanese. More than 320,000 people haven’t been able to return to their home.
What followed has been a period of Israeli occupation, continued air strikes and demolition, which Israel Katz has said will continue so long as Hezbollah remains a threat to Israel’s north.
Displaced residents look from one side of the invisible security zone line into the other, often watching as their homes are destroyed.
From the town of Zawtar El-Gharbiyeh, Amar Amar watched IDF bulldozers move towards his home in neighbouring Zawtar El-Charqiyeh.
“Every day there are explosions there, burning of houses, the bulldozing of farm land, uprooting of ancient olive trees,”
Mr Amar said.
“Every day we come and stand here to look and see what’s new in our village, if they say there was an explosion in a certain place, we try and look at it.”
From the hilltop, Israeli bulldozers could be seen kicking up dust in Zawtar El-Charqiyeh. Soldiers wandered through a damaged home while other buildings nearby lay in total ruin.
Zawtar El-Charqiyeh sits on the edge of the zone the IDF has established in Lebanon. Israeli soldiers withdrew from the neighbouring town of Zawtar El-Gharbiyeh in late July, less than a kilometre away.
The towns are usually connected by a dirt road. Now they’re divided by a dirt mound and a Lebanese army tank at the perimeter of the town. On one side is the IDF, on the other is the Lebanese Armed Forces.
Israel’s defence minister has insisted its forces would continue to clear the area still under its control, demolishing homes and villages — something he has likened to the Beit Hanoun model, referring to the destruction of the northern reaches of Gaza.
Miroslav Zafirov, a former UN peace process advisor and current expert at Washington DC-based think tank Atlantic Council, said by creating buffer zones and clearing so much of what existed within them, Israel was “insulating its boundaries”.
“This is part of the tactic and the strategy that the country has defined for itself. Is it forceful? Yes it is. Is that acceptable for the region? Unlikely.
“This is the adopted tactic that serves … the present moment — the new reality of post 7th October.”
The IDF argued it was operating in southern Lebanon to “remove threats” from Hezbollah and was acting in accordance with international law, despite the criticism of its presence there.
“Israel does not operate against the State of Lebanon or its civilians,” it told the ABC.
“IDF operations in southern Lebanon take place in a dynamic and complex operational environment. Restrictions in certain areas where sustained operational activity is underway stem solely from security considerations and are intended to protect IDF troops.”
This was echoed by Israel’s defence minister in August. Mr Katz said “under no circumstances” would the IDF withdraw from “the security zones: not in Lebanon, not in Syria, not in Gaza” as long as threats remained.
Gaza’s yellow and orange lines
Israel’s seizure of territory on what it says are security grounds is most keenly felt in war-ravaged Gaza where the strip’s population of more than 2 million people are crammed into less than half of its 365 square kilometres.
When the ceasefire was declared in October 2025, the IDF held roughly 51 per cent of the territory — the boundary of that was referred to as the “Yellow Line”. And over time, the yellow line has shifted deeper into Gaza.
Earlier this year, the IDF reportedly issued aid organisations in Gaza maps detailing a new boundary referred to as the “Orange Line”.
Between the orange and yellow line boundary is a “restricted zone”, according to Israeli non-government organisation (NGO) Gisha, where any movement by humanitarians must be coordinated with the IDF.
Passing through the area — which Gazans and NGOs continue to do — comes at extreme risk.
In June, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said: “You sneeze near the orange line and you may well get shot.”
The orange line is an expanded zone of IDF control beyond the yellow line, which has also moved. Based on ABC analysis, the IDF now controls more than 64 per cent (236 square kilometres) of the strip.
In response to questions from the ABC, the IDF said it “does not recognise” the so-called Orange Line. That’s despite its own mapping being distributed earlier this year. While COGAT, an Israeli government agency which reports to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and is responsible for distributing aid in Gaza, has acknowledged its existence.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been open in his desire to take more, saying he gave orders to push even deeper into the strip and seize 70 per cent of it.
“Let’s start with that, squeeze them from all sides, we will deal with what’s left over,” he said.
Palestinian families have been left with nowhere else to go.
“Mango, grapes, guava, thyme, mint, we had it all. We were amongst our chickens, our life was beautiful,” 40-year-old Fawzia Abu Daqqa said, smiling at the memory.
“Unfortunately, nothing is left. I can’t go home. I would be dead even before reaching my home. It is a dangerous place.”
Ms Abu Daqqa was from Abassan al-Kabira from the eastern outskirts of Khan Younis. Now she is living in a school.
The mother of three has remained in Khan Younis, a city that is now divided by the orange and yellow lines.
The UN said families were forced into a re-occurring cycle of displacement as the lines move.
For Ms Abu Daqqa, “the yellow line means death”.
“Life has changed because of the yellow line.
The IDF has been accused of shooting people who approach the Yellow Line, including civilians. Children are among the dead.
“The IDF does not operate against civilians and does not use live fire against individuals solely because they approach the Yellow Line area,” it told the ABC.
“IDF soldiers act only in response to threats.”
Porous borders
Israel has been able to redraw the map of the immediate region around it and physically take control of territory through everything from piles of rubble and gates, to earthworks and bureaucratic wrangling.
It has used all of the tools at its disposal to, in its view, protect its security.
For some commentators, the security zone strategy is a temporary one.
But for a nervous region once again in the grip of a chaotic, multi-front war, there is a simmering anxiety the IDF troops will never retreat and the new lines on the map will become the new normal.
Israel has been in a perpetual state of war since the October 7 attacks. Benjamin Netanyahu describes his country as fighting on seven different fronts — eight if you include what he labelled as an information war, or how Israel is perceived around the world.
Many of his critics, particularly ahead of the upcoming Israeli election, argue those war aims have not been achieved — in part because they have been vague or deliberately and repeatedly changed.
But what cannot be disputed is Israel has gained control of large tracts of land in sovereign countries it borders and disputed territory international law states it has no right to.
The full impact of that is still to play out.
Credits:
This story is a collaboration between ABC News International, including our Middle East bureau, ABC NEWS Verify and the Digital Story Innovation team. We rely on freelance journalists in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza and acknowledge their important contribution to this reporting. Our colleagues in Gaza ask to have their identities withheld for safety reasons.
Reporting: Middle East correspondent Matthew Doran, Maryanne Taouk, Emily Clark and Mark Doman, with additional reporting by Sami Sockol, Raed Khatib, Cherine Yazbeck, Mohammed Yassin, Abdelmajed Al Karh and ABC staff in Gaza
Mapping and satellite imagery analysis: Mark Doman and Maryanne Taouk
Data analysis: Maryanne Taouk, Emily Clark and Josh Nicholas
Design: Katia Shatoba
Development: Thomas Brettell
Video production: Jack Fisher
Photography: Hamish Harty, Burhan Bhat, Mohammed Yassin, ABC staff in Gaza, Getty Images and Reuters
Editing: Clare Blumer, Briony Sowden and Roscoe Whalan
Notes:
The ABC approached the offices of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (who has responsibility for settlement developments and approvals) and Defense Minister Israel Katz with questions about the Israeli government’s rationale and justification for recent decisions.
Ground incursion data was compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), the ABC then filtered result to just show movement of forces on the ground. In the analysis the Syrian boundaries, the ABC used local media sources, satellite imagery, and United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) reports.
Satellite images were sourced from Planet Labs and the European Union’s Sentinel-2.
West Bank analysis was completed using a dataset of planning documents attached to applications on the Israel Planning Authority portal between the dates October 2023 and October 2026.
Planning applications were cross-referenced with Israel-based real estate web listings and with two Israel-based human rights advocacy groups, Kerem Navot and Peace Now, to verify location and settlement boundaries.
Each location was manually checked against a database of listed legal settlements in the West Bank including Knesset cabinet decisions and announcements.
Buffer zone limits in Gaza and Lebanon were calculated in kilometres squared based on the most recent IDF issued flyers, boundary data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and on visual verification of IDF positions.
