Live: Over 100,000 bodies found in mass grave near Damascus
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Qatar's foreign ministry has condemned the Israeli government plans to expand its settlements in the occupied Golan Heights.
In a statement, the ministry denounced the move as “a new chapter in a series of Israeli attacks on Syrian territories and a blatant violation of international law”.
The ministry reiterated the Gulf country's support for Syria’s "sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity," and called on the international community to pressure Israel to stop its incursions into Syria.
Israel launched around 800 strikes on Syrian territory in one week.
Russia's foreign ministry has announced the withdrawal of "part" of its diplomatic personnel on Sunday.
“On December 15, the withdrawal of part of the personnel of the Russian (diplomatic) representation in Damascus was carried out by a special flight of the Russian Air Force from the Hmeimim airbase," the ministry’s crisis situations department said in a statement on Telegram.
Qatar's foreign ministry said in a statement on Sunday that a delegation had arrived in Damascus to prepare for the reopening of Qatar's embassy in Syria.
The Gulf country shut its embassy and withdrew its ambassador from Damascus in July 2011 following a series of deadly crackdowns by Bashar al-Assad's government on street protesters.
UK Foreign minister David Lammy has confirmed that Britain has had "diplomatic contact" with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group.
"HTS remains a proscribed organisation, but we can have diplomatic contact and so we do have diplomatic contact as you would expect," Lammy told broadcasters on Sunday.
"Using all the channels that we have available, and those are diplomatic and, of course, intelligence-led channels, we seek to deal with HTS where we have to."
On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has had direct contact with HTS.
Reporting by Reuters
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he spoke with US President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday night about the developments in Syria and a recent push to secure the release of Israeli and foreign hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
In a statement, Netanyahu said that Israel has "no interest in a conflict with Syria," adding that its incursions into the territory were intended to "thwart the potential threats from Syria and to prevent the takeover of terrorist elements near our border".
The United Nations special envoy to Syria on Sunday called for "justice and accountability" in the country, rather than acts of "revenge" following the overthrow of president Bashar al-Assad.
"We need to see of course justice and accountability for crimes. And we need to make sure that that goes through a credible justice system, and that we don't see any revenge," Geir Pedersen said in Damascus.
Reporting by AFP
The EU will not lift sanctions on Syria before its new rulers ensure minorities are not persecuted and women's rights are protected within a unified government that disavows religious extremism, the EU's top diplomat said.
An EU foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels on Monday, which had Syria on the agenda, would not discuss expanding financial support to the country beyond that already provided by the EU through United Nations agencies, the European Union's new foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said.
"One of the questions is whether we are able to, in the future, look at the adaptation of the sanctions regime. But this clearly is not the question of today, but rather in the future where we have seen that the steps go in the right direction," Kallas told Reuters in an interview.
While the EU has in place a tough sanctions regime against Syria, the rebel group that led the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad - Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham - has also been under sanctions for years, complicating matters for the international community.
The EU was already the biggest donor of humanitarian aid to Syria, Kallas said.
"We need to discuss what more can we do. But as I say, it can't come as a blank cheque," Kallas added.
Israel's government has approved a plan to expand settlements in the occupied Golan Heights, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said on Sunday.
The statement said that Netanyahu acted "in light of the war and the new front facing Syria", as well as a desire to double the population of the Golan Heights.
France will send a team of diplomats to Syria on Tuesday to assess the political and security situation, the foreign ministry said, without specifying who they would meet.
Most EU governments welcomed Bashar al-Assad's fall but are considering whether they can work with the rebels who ousted him, including Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group that is designated a terrorist organisation by the EU.
"A team of French diplomats will travel to Syria this Tuesday to mark France's willingness to support the Syrian people," the ministry said, adding that they would report back to the foreign minister after a series of contacts there.
Since cutting ties with Assad in 2012, France has not sought to normalise ties with Syria's government and has backed a broadly secular exiled opposition and Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria.
The United Nations special envoy to Syria on Sunday called for "justice and accountability" in the country, rather than acts of "revenge" following the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.
"We need to see of course justice and accountability for crimes. And we need to make sure that that goes through a credible justice system, and that we don't see any revenge," Geir Pedersen said as he arrived in Damascus.
Reporting by AFP
UN envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen has called for a quick end of western sanctions on Syria, including those in place against Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
"We can hopefully see a quick end to the sanctions so that we can see really a rallying around the building of Syria," he told journalists during his visit to Damascus.
"We need to get the political process underway that is inclusive of all Syrians," Pedersen said. "That process obviously needs to be led by the Syrians themselves."
A week after Bashar al-Assad’s government was overthrown, one of Syria’s top human rights workers has a sobering message: 100,000 missing people are almost certainly dead.
Fadel Abdulghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), has been working for years with a team of 21 people within Syria to record everyone who was detained or simply vanished without a trace.
As rebel forces bore down on Damascus, seizing city after city, the SNHR visited every prison and detention centre as they fell, documenting as many detainees freed from their cells as they could.
“Our records show that approximately 136,000 people were either being detained or had been forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime,” Abdulghany tells Middle East Eye.
The figure includes more than 5,000 children.
READ MORE: Syrians face grim prospect of never finding missing relatives
The Syrian civil defence said that six civilians from the same family, including three children, were killed in a landmine explosion in the eastern Hama countryside.
The civil defence says the family was travelling by car near the village of Rahjan on Saturday when its members were killed by an unexploded mine.
Students returned to classrooms in Syria on Sunday after the country's new rulers ordered schools reopened in a potent sign of some normalcy a week after rebels swept into the capital in the dramatic overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.
The country's new de facto leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, faces a massive challenge to rebuild Syria after 13 years of civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Cities were bombed to ruins, the economy was gutted by international sanctions and millions of refugees still live in camps outside Syria.
Officials said most schools were opening around the country on Sunday, which is the first day of the working week in most Arab countries.
However, some parents were not sending their children to school due to uncertainty regarding the situation.
Reporting by Reuters
