After years of war and widespread upheaval, one corner of the Middle East has fundamentally changed.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed, and many multiples more injured and displaced.
The devastating chain of events has resulted in the map of the region being redrawn, mostly shaped by the decisions of one country and enforcement by its military.
The Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed around 1,200 people and resulted in 251 people being taken hostage.
It triggered a ferocious and grinding war in Gaza as Hamas and its partners were pursued for their crimes, and the explosion of fighting in Lebanon as Hezbollah opened fire on Israel in solidarity with Palestinians.
Large military operations were launched in the West Bank and an opportunity was seized in Syria after the collapse of a decades-long dictatorship in late 2024.
The official justification was security, and the need to insulate Israel and Israelis by carving out so-called buffer or security zones — including inside the borders of neighbouring sovereign nations.
The new lines across the map have taken different forms: rubble, gates, cement blocks, check points and, in Syria, a trench.
The ABC has reviewed satellite imagery, government documents and maps, and has spoken to people in the communities enveloped by this situation to understand the impact of Israel's conduct.
Analysis of Israeli military positions, buffer zones and settlement plans since October 2023 has found Israel now controls at least 2,490 square kilometres of territory across Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank.
It is an area approximately the size of the Australian Capital Territory.
That reality on the ground has fueled deeper concerns among critics of Israel, given the country has never explicitly defined its borders.
There are some extreme, religious elements of Israeli society which rely on passages in the Old Testament to suggest the country should have a claim over a massive swathe of the Middle East.
But the more mainstream view, including that held by the governing Likud Party, is that Israel should include all of biblical Judea and Samaria — roughly correlating to the current West Bank — and perhaps also parts of Gaza.
At the very least, Israel's government has said it will not allow the creation of a Palestinian state.
It says it is fighting for survival as it redraws the map. Those directly in Israel's sights argue it is simply pursuing its own territorial ambitions.
Between Alpha and Bravo
There is an area on the border of Lebanon and Syria where Israel's so-called security strategy appears to culminate.
As two buffer zones meet, the IDF secures a vantage point on Mount Hermon that looks over Syria's capital, Damascus, and into Lebanon.
For decades, this area was a demilitarised zone patrolled by United Nations forces. But that has now changed, and it began with a trench.
In August 2024, construction of this 5-metre-wide trench began.
Most of the world considers the trench to be in Syria.
But the military responsible for digging it is Israel.
In the first months of construction, the expansion of the trench followed what is known as the Alpha Line — the border between the occupied Golan Heights, which was annexed by Israel in 1981, and a demilitarised buffer zone.
For 50 years, UN forces patrolled the buffer zone. To the west was the Alpha Line, which the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were supposed to stay behind. To the east was the Bravo line, which Syrian forces could not cross.
In December 2024, Syria changed. Nearly 14 years of civil war came to an end as rebel forces prevailed, and dictator Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus for a rumoured life of exile in Russia.
In the months that followed, satellite imagery showed that Israel's strategy in the region began to change.
The construction of Israel's trench moved further into the buffer zone and, in some areas, the gutter appears to dissect Syrian towns, analysis of satellite imagery shows.
The IDF did not respond to the ABC's request for comment on the specific justification for digging the trench. It replied with a general comment that it operates in southern Syria to protect Israel and Israelis.
The military has also been constructing military bases deeper inside the buffer zone and beyond it.
Of the nine bases identified by conflict monitors and visible in ABC analysis of satellite imagery, the IDF now has three bases inside Syria, beyond the Bravo Line.
The Israeli military has launched increasingly sustained and entrenched activity inside Syria, saying it had carried out strikes in support of the Druze. The ethnic minority lives across parts of Syria, Israel and Lebanon, and some see Israel as protectors.
It also said it attacked positions where "projectiles" had been launched into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
The Office of the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recently reported ground incursions, patrols, raids and searches are routinely happening, and noted the IDF had "detained 49 individuals, including two children" on Syrian territory.
The IDF told the ABC it had found weapons, "thwarted" smuggling rings, and detained "suspects involved in advancing terrorist activities", claiming it operates in accordance with international law.
"It has become like the old security services under Bashar al-Assad, when his forces used to raid houses in the middle of the night while people were asleep," Syrian Malik Hussein Ibrahim said.
The ABC met Mr Ibrahim in July at his village Abdin, a Sunni village in the southernmost point of Syria.
It is less than 1.5 kilometres away from the Bravo line where residents said they were forced to defend themselves and their homes with rocks and sticks.
"Now the Israeli army comes to search," he said.
"Search for what? We have no weapons, nothing. We only have sticks. We didn't shoot at them or point weapons at them.
"We are simple villagers. We make our living by farming, growing wheat, barley, and tomatoes. That's our life."
Analysis of local reporting, videos and images from alleged instances of Israeli incursions into Syria reveals how the IDF presence on the ground has been escalating.
During one incident in June, a Syrian television crew was fired upon by Israeli forces as they reported on the IDF's presence near Abdin.
"I was wearing my press flak jacket, together with Ayman the cameraman. We were standing right here when they opened fire directly at us," Youssef Hariri from Syrian state broadcaster Al-Ikhbariya told the ABC.
"We were among residential homes. We left the village to prevent the situation from escalating and the gunfire from turning into shelling, although they continued firing at us for more than 10 minutes."
The IDF told the ABC a resident of Abdin had opened fire on soldiers, prompting them to fire back.
Youssef Hariri said he did not see or hear anyone firing at the IDF from the village before they shot at him and his colleague.
"No, not at all. We were journalists, and it was just me and the cameraman. As you can see in the video, we were surrounded by children. We were covering the incursion into the area … when the soldiers began firing directly at us."
From the fall of Assad until mid-August this year, there were more than 1,060 reports of ground incursions into Syria by Israeli military forces, collected and collated by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).
Mapping the incursion reports shows a cluster in the south-western corner of Syria, with one reported IDF ground operation 60 kilometres beyond the Bravo line inside Syria.
ACLED Syria analyst Muaz Al Abdullah told the ABC while UN forces remained in the buffer zone, it was no longer effective in preventing the Israeli incursions in the Syrian territories.
"The buffer zone no longer exists. It has become an area with full Israeli control,"he said.
In August, the UN also reported Israel continued to occupy the zone, which is approximately 234 square kilometres of territory.
Together with the occupied Golan Heights, which most countries including Australia do not recognise as Israeli territory, Israel controls approximately 1,453 square kilometres of Syrian territory.
At the end of August, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the IDF would "not move from Mount Hermon and the security zone" as long as there were what he perceived as threats.
Israel's movements in Syria are just one part of its security zone strategy and the ground it controls there is only part of the picture.
Bureaucracy and secret cabinet decisions
Security, or buffer zones, can be relatively simple to define on a map. For the most part, these are the actions of the military.
In the occupied West Bank, the question of how much land Israel has taken over is more complicated.
There are a few key considerations.
First, the land being turned into official settlements where Israelis can live legally according to their own government — sometimes retrospectively, after the communities are established.
Secondly, the amount of land Palestinian people have been expelled from or prevented from accessing.
Settlements in the occupied West Bank are Israeli residential communities established on land that most of the world, including Australia, recognises as Palestinian. Land that would be central to any future Palestinian state.
All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law — in 2024 an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice affirmed this — but Israel has attempted to legitimise them within its own legal system.
It is a highly controversial approach and has been labelled by human rights organisations and UN bodies as de facto annexation. It is a system built for Israelis.
East Jerusalem, seized by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967, has been annexed.
The ABC found 273 development and planning applications lodged in the last three years with the Israel planning authority for "Judea and Samaria", the name Israel uses for the West Bank. Of those the ABC could only find one that was rejected.
In recent years, Benjamin Netanyahu's government has bypassed even its own processes to rapidly approve settlements.
His government has moved away from funnelling decisions on settlements via Israeli bureaucratic channels. Instead it has approved groups of new settlements via sometimes secret cabinet decisions.
In an April cabinet decision, 34 new settlements were approved. A year earlier, the cabinet approved 22 new settlements. One of them was Marom Yehuda.
Just off Route 60, north of Hebron in the West Bank, a gate has changed everything.
One of the main entrances to the Palestinian town of Halhul is regularly closed to traffic by a large orange gate.
It forces residents to make massive detours through other towns and villages to access their homes. Trucks carrying freight often park on one side of the gate and unload their cargo underneath it and then reload into waiting trucks on the other side.
Muhammad Husain Ismail Mereab, 76, has run an auto shop and café near the gate for the last 20 years.
"This gate has no specific opening times. Sometimes they open it, sometimes they don't, sometimes they open it but they erect a checkpoint," he said.
Muhammad's house was behind his workshop, but he said some of his land was suddenly seized by Israeli authorities when they claimed it was needed to "expand roads in the area".
"They bulldozed it, including the vines, to prepare it to be used for the new road," he said. "We asked them to wait until we could harvest and eat from the trees but they refused."
On the other side of Route 60 from Halhul, it is a very different story.
A former illegal community, something called an outpost, has been transformed into a settlement that has now been approved under Israeli law.
It is called Marom Yehuda and to celebrate the new designation and construction at the site, settlers and supporters held a "family fair".
Alongside the bouncing castles, pizza ovens and child entertainer
