Bright green fields stretch down the hill towards the Syrian border from the Quneitra Lookout Point in the Golan. The twitter of birds is interspersed with the pop of machine-gun fire.
Now and again, a puff of black smoke mushrooms up from behind a hill to the south. Everyone is war-watching. Tourists snap selfies and gaze at the horizon with binoculars. And next to the Quneitra border crossing, just a kilometre away, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (Undof) is camped on the Israeli side of the fence, having pulled out of Syria last September when the fighting in Quneitra intensified.
Things can still get more surreal. The IDF believes that the black flag of Islamic State (IS) could yet be seen flying a few kilometres from the border on the Syrian side.
A mix of jihadi and rebel groups — which include al-Qaeda ally Jabhat al-Nusra — are in possession of Quneitra’s old town, while Syrian government troops control the new town. According to one IDF official: “Any of those anti-government forces could one day declare allegiance to IS, and then we’d have the full spectrum of these charming people on our borders.”
Winter snows have kept a lid on the fighting but with the onset of spring, the fierce battles that saw Undof pull out of Quneitra are expected to return.
After Syria collapsed into war, the IDF established an intelligence-gathering unit to keep a close eye on a border that had been quiet since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
In the past two years, there has been an increasing number of incidents in which fire has been directed at Israeli troops. The IDF has always responded by targeting the precise source of the attack — whether a mortar on a pick-up truck or a group of foot soldiers — in an effort to avoid escalation.
For the IDF, the immediate conflict can be contained, but the wider concern is strategic. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has kept his best divisions ranged around him in Damascus, and the rebel groups are generally poorly armed and only capable of low-intensity warfare.
However, Hizbollah, the Iran-backed Shia army that has tens of thousands of long-range missiles stationed in southern Lebanon, has been gaining combat experience as it supports Syrian government troops against the rebels. According to an IDF official, it has a battalion-strength force at work in the Syrian Golan.
The Syrian Civil War also brought new challenges to the Zif hospital in Zefat, around 30km from the Quneitra crossing inside Israel.
Anthony Luder, head of paediatrics at the hospital, said: “Back in February 2013, military ambulances turned up with seven Syrian patients. At first, the reaction was: what is this? But then we switched into medical mode.”
To date, the hospital has treated 459 Syrians — many of whom are young combatants — out of a total of around 1,000 admitted in other medical centres in the north of Israel.
Many of the Syrian patients are fitting with expensive prosthetics, which have to be specially prepared so that they bare no trace of their Israeli origins.
In a ward for Syrian males, a bearded 27-year-old fighter lies in bed; both of his arms are missing. He explains that he was injured when his village, 4km from the Israeli border, was hit by artillery.
“I didn’t expect any friendly contact with Israel,” he said. “The situation is terrible there. There is bombing every day.”
“We don’t ask them which group they belong to,” said Mr Luder, “our role is to treat them. For me, this is a sign of the quality of this country. We even have a human feeling for our enemies.”
