French journalist arrested by Israeli army in occupied Golan

A freelance French journalist, Sylvain Mercadier, and a Syrian lawyer, Mohammad Fayad, were released after being arrested Wednesday by the Israeli army while reporting in the occupied Syrian Golan, a French diplomat said. According to his colleagues, who reacted widely and called for his release on social media, the journalist was violently apprehended by Israeli troops "while covering Israel's advance into Syrian territory in Al-Hamidiyah, on the outskirts of Quneitra."

"They are neither members of Hamas, nor Hezbollah, nor HTS [Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist rebel group that led the offensive against Assad]. As Israel is considered a 'democratic' country, they must be released quickly," wrote Quentin Muller on X, the head of the international service for the French media Marianne, with which Mercadier collaborates.

He stated that the Marianne editorial team doesn't have news of the journalist and his companion, while witnesses claim they were "beaten, handcuffed and blindfolded before being taken away to an unknown location." His electronic equipment was also reportedly seized.

"We reported the arrest of a French reporter in the separation zone between Syria and Israel," said Israeli army spokesperson Nadav Shoshani. "This person approached the soldiers several times. Today, he got very close again. The soldiers briefly took him in and then released him after determining he did not pose a threat. He is not currently in custody, he is not detained, he was not taken anywhere, nor was his equipment."

A few days earlier, Mercadier had published a report in Marianne claiming that the Israeli army had moved out of the Golan Heights and started invading Syrian villages by "occupying houses, brutalizing the population, even burning Qurans and raising Israeli flags."

On Dec. 8, the day of the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Israeli army announced it had deployed in the demilitarized buffer zone of the Golan, in the southwest of Syria, at the edge of the part of this plateau occupied by Israel since 1967 and annexed in 1981.