In the Druze village of Majdal Shams, situated in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, a mountain range separates the residents from the raging war across the border in Syria. The locals speak of firing and bombardments that can be not only heard but sometimes seen. “I have family in Syria,” says Hassan, a local council worker. “I am very worried about them.”

Many Majdal Shams residents are in a similar position: They have relatives in Syria, separated after Israel captured the Golan plateau during the 1967 war. All they can do is watch the war on TV, and hear the muffled tones of friends and family on the telephone. Their frustration is shared in part by some of the Jewish residents of the Golan Heights. “I really dislike the situation that we as neighbours can’t help,” says Edit Kimchi, 50, a resident of the town of Katzrin. “Because we can’t. Whatever we do is bad, so we’d better not help,” she says. “But they are in a holocaust! They are where we were just 70 years ago!”

“There are frequent demonstrations here, both for and anti-Assad,” says Salman Fakherldeen, a human-rights advocate at Al-Marsad, the Arab Center for Human Rights in the Golan. Sitting in his living room and offering sweet cake and coffee, he shakes his head. “There is a peasantry culture that persists here, of the older, uneducated generation, who support Assad. They have no problem that he is killing people every day. But the intelligent, younger graduates are against him.” Speaking of the killings that go on across the border, Fakherldeen says that not the whole story is being told. “I think there are hundreds and hundreds of deaths that are still hidden.” Several days after we speak, more than 80 bodies of men, women and children shot at point-blank range were found in a river in Aleppo.

But many analysts have been speaking for several months of the threat to Israeli residents from the consequences of the Syrian conflict. Many are worried of a possible spillover, particularly concerning the country’s chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) which could end up in the wrong hands.