US envoy clarifies Golan Heights comments after contradicting Trump

Tom Barrack, President Trump’s U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria and Iraq, on Sunday walked back comments he made last week suggesting that Israel “still” occupies the Golan Heights in violation of United Nations resolutions, which contradict the president’s position.

Barrack made the remark Friday in an interview with Lebanese Australian entrepreneur Mario Nawfal. He later told The Associated Press he was describing the territory’s historical status and that it was “not an endorsement of the United Nations’ position.”

“United States policy on the Golan was set by President Trump in 2019 and is unchanged,” Barrack told the AP, saying he intended to explain why he does not expect Israel to annex Lebanon.

The special envoy referred to negotiated agreements, like the end of the latest Israel-Hezbollah war, as more long-lasting, having used the Golan as an example of “territory taken by force remains contested for generations.”

Barrack said Hezbollah and Iran are the “two people missing from” those negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, emphasizing that the U.S. does not negotiate with Hezbollah. He said the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization’s “weapons in question are supplied and financed by Iran.”

“I was describing the difficulty of the problem, not proposing a new [negotiating] table,” he told the AP. “Hezbollah is a designated foreign terrorist organization. We do not negotiate with it, and nothing I said suggests otherwise.”

Israel claimed the Golan Heights after the 1967 war and annexed it in 1981. The U.N. does not consider the occupied territory as belonging to Israel and does not recognize the annexation.

Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019.

Barrack, in the same interview with Nawfal, criticized Israel’s strikes on Abu Duhur air base in Syria last week. He called the strikes an “unnecessary escalation” and said the U.S. will host diplomatic talks to produce “de-escalation agreements” between Syria and Israel.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz defended the strikes Sunday on the social platform X , saying that critics who first called the attack “unnecessary and politically motivated” changed their position after the Israeli military released “clear intelligence” that clarified its actions.

“The statements by the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister to Erdoğan and the warnings that we will not allow Turkey to establish itself in Syria and endanger Israel’s security –– are unnecessary and dangerous,” Katz wrote, referring to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The United Kingdom-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Turkey has been working to rehabilitate the base and bring it back into service.

Turkey and Syria have denied that Turkish forces were deployed to the air base. The base has been out of service since 2013, after Syrian rebels clashed with former Syrian President Bashar Assad’s military.