Gulf of Aqaba to Eilat-bound ships, the Ba'ath government supported the Egyptian leader and amassed troops in the strategic Golan Heights. Syria sponsored Palestinian raids into Israel and Syrian artillery repeatedly bombed Israeli civilian communities from positions on the Golan Heights. Concerning the raids on Israel's territory, Syria claimed that it could not be held responsible for the activities of El-Fatah and El-Asefa, nor for the rise of Palestinian organizations.
Conflicts also arose over different interpretations of the legal status of the Demilitarized Zone. Israel maintained that it had sovereign rights over the zone, allowing the civilian use of farmland. Syria and the UN maintained that no party had sovereign rights over the zone. Israel was accused by Syria of cultivating lands in the Demilitarized Zone, using armored tractors backed by Israel forces. Syria claimed that the situation was the result of an Israeli aim to increase tension so as to justify large-scale aggression, and to expand its occupation of the Demilitarized Zone by liquidating the rights of Arab cultivators.
Conflict over the cultivation of disputed lands sparked into 7 April prewar aerial clashes between Israel and Syria. The Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan said in a 1976 interview that Israel provoked more than 80% of the clashes with Syria. After Israel launched a preemptive strike on Egypt to begin the June 1967 war, Syria joined the battle against Israel as well. In the final days of the war, after having captured the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, as well as the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from Jordan, Israel turned its attention to Syria, capturing the entire Golan Heights in under 48 hours.
Conflict developed between an extremist military wing and a more moderate civilian wing of the Ba'ath Party. The 1970 retreat of Syrian forces sent to aid the PLO during the "Black September" hostilities with Jordan reflected this political
