The Israeli army “will remain at the summit of the Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh) and the security zone indefinitely to ensure the security of the communities of the Golan Heights and the north, and all the residents of Israel,” he said during a visit to Israeli forces in the area.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the Israel Defense Forces would remain inside the Syrian buffer zone "indefinitely" while visiting troops there on Tuesday."The IDF will remain at the summit of the Hermon and the security zone indefinitely to ensure the security of the communities of the Golan Heights and the north,

After the ouster of Syria's longtime leader Bashar al-Assad last month, Israel's military has taken up a new post in the demilitarized buffer zone created in Syria after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Mount Hermon, a huge cluster of snowcapped mountain peaks towering above the Syria-Lebanon border, overlooks the Damascus countryside as well as the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.