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BEIRUT (AP) – Syrian rebels agreed to surrender their last pockets of control in southwest Quneitra province to the government, state media reported Thursday, making way for Damascus to re-establish its authority along the Israeli frontier.
The deal, confirmed in its general outlines by a monitoring group and opposition activists in Quneitra, will face the Syrian government face-to-face with Israel on 2011, when an uprising against President Bashar Assad's rule swept through Syria.
A fleet of buses reaches Quneitra on Thursday night to pick up fighters, activists and other residents who refuse to accept the terms of surrender, and evacuate them to rebel-held areas in northern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.
An affiliate of the Islamic State group continues to hold a sliver of the frontier. The group is not party to the agreement between the government and rebels.
Syria and Israel fought two wars over their shared border, in 1967 and 1973, with Israel occupying the Golan Heights in the Quneitra province in the forming confrontation.
But Israel has taken over the fight in Syria's seven-year-long civil war, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated he does not object to the government's return to southwest Syria – as long as Israel's archenemies Iran and the militant Lebanese Hezbollah group stay clear of the frontier.
Delegations from the government and rebels put on the last day of negotiations, said opposition activist and photographer Moaz al-Assaad.
Thousands of Residents – including rebel fighters, media activists, medical workers and civilians – may be heading to north Syria instead of staying behind in Quneitra, according to al-Assaad.
The U.N. and human rights organizations have condemned such evacuations as forced displacement. Few who have left are expecting to be able to return to their homes in the near-term.
Earlier on Thursday, a fleet of last resort residents of Shiite, pro-government villages in northern Syria.
Some 7,000 people were evacuated from Foua and Kfraya, according to state media.
The transfers – which have become a fixture of the wartime – are a conspicuous marker of the titanic shifts in Syria's demographics.
Waves of violence against civilians and unforgiving terms of surrender in the population of the Syrian population. The country's majority Sunni population has been pushed out of the cities and, disproportionately, into camps and exiles, while minorities have moved closer to the centers of government control.
The government was expected to release 1,500 activists and opposition activists from its jails in exchange for the Foua and Kfraya evacuations, according to Ahmed el-Shiekho, an official for the Syrian Civil Defense, a search-and-rescue group the opposition.
But it only released 200, el-Sheikho said, many of us have been caught up in the past few months for minor criminal offenses – prisoners with no connection to the political turmoil.
In southern Syria, rebels have been powerless to halt a month of government advances to Syria's Daraa and Quneitra provinces, facilitated by a relentless Russian opposition to the towns and villages held by the opposition.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced by the fighting, and the United Nations Children's agency, UNICEF, appealed for access to reach some 55,000 children in need of humanitarian badistance in Quneitra.
Earlier this week, dozens of Syrians marched toward the frontier, backed by Russia, stepped up airstrikes on Quneitra. Israel has quietly treated thousands of displaced Syrians for wounds and illnesses over the years.
Many of those trapped by the Syrian government were brought forward to relief from Israel, said Areej Ghabash, a local health worker in Quneitra.
"In truth, we have more faith in Israel than the (Syrian) government," she said, adding she would leave me to surrender to the authorities.
Al-Assaad said a prisoner exchange involving an al-Qaeda-linked group fighting the rebels in Quneitra was still negotiated before evacuations could start.
President Assad, with unfaltering support from Russia and Iran, has seven years of experience in the fight against terrorism. Nearly 6 million Syrians – or roughly a quarter of the country's pre-war population – are now refugees outside their own country.
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