Following the Israeli occupation in 1967, over 130,000 native Syrian inhabitants – approximately 95% of the population – were forcibly transferred or displaced from their homes.
Al-Marsad condemns plans by the Israeli government to build 1600 homes in the illegal Israeli settlement of Katzrin in the Occupied Syrian Golan.
Al-Marsad is calling on all parties to the civil war in Syria, the UN Security Council and the UN special envoy for the Syria crisis, Staffan De Mistura, to take immediate steps to ensure the end of the use of hunger as a weapon of war and to lift the sieges without delay.
According to the Law of Occupation, Israel being the occupying country, has the legal obligation to act as just administrator of public property and natural resources. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 2013 Israel's Energy and Water Resources Ministry granted Genie Energy, an American-Israeli company, an exclusive licence to explore for oil and gas in a 153-square miles radius in the southern part of the Golan.
Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011 the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity by both the government and pro-government forces and the anti-government military groups has continued to escalate, leading to the worst humanitarian crisis since the Rwandan genocide.