 Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosel here bringing you another video of intrigue for us as strange folk, the border-spotting enthusiast. In my defense, I actually came to this place not to spot a border, but it's quite hard to go very far in this part of Israel without encountering something related to borders or the like. What you're looking at behind me here is actually Israel's border with Syria. Now to be a bit more technical about it, it's actually the DMZ, the Demilitarized Zone, which is comprised of a little small patch of land located between Undof Line Alpha and Undof Line Bravo. Undof is the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, and it's one of the UN missions like UNIFIL, UNSO, UNSCOT does get a bit confusing who have a presence on the ground here in Israel. And just across the border, so you have the DMZ and then the border is, I'm just going to step out of the frame for a second, is Al-Qunaitra, which is in Syria and has been a site of shelling between Syrian rebels and pro-government forces. And we're so close at this point that you can hear occasionally explosions across the border. A few words about where I am located, this rooftop. So it's labeled on Google Maps as Syrian Army Headquarters or the Syrian Headquarters in Hebrew Habinyan Hamoudi'in Hasuri, which means that the build is slightly different, meaning the building of Syrian intelligence. This was built in 1962 by a Russian architect and it was built very well. The reason that we know it's built very well is firstly, I mean it's still standing, so there's that. But it was actually bombed repetitively by Israel and it has stood nonetheless. But you can actually go inside, it's an abandoned building, the corridors at the moment are kind of full of water and icicles. But you can actually see the stairways are sort of bombed out, metal poking out of them, that kind of stuff. So you can see a little bit about its history. This building actually played a very important role during the Six-Day War because it was a command post for the Syrian army. There are a couple of theories that this was actually firstly constructed as a hospital, but from what I understand from talking to a tour guide downstairs and from reading on the internet, the consensus is that this was always built as a command post, effectively a forward command center for the Syrian army in the Golan. Now during the Six-Day War Israel bombed this because it was a site of strategic importance to the Syrians and it bombed it a couple of times. Ultimately the building was abandoned and when Israel came here they planted the Israeli flag on the rooftop I'm standing on and found a treasure trove of documents that proved a huge key to Israeli intelligence. During firstly the course of the Six-Day War and afterwards as well the Israeli military intelligence which is known as AMAN gained a lot of information from this post. A couple more details about it that I think are interesting. It's on the Eli Cohen trail, Eli Cohen of course being the legendary Israeli spy who was ultimately killed, hung in Damascus and about whom an excellent Netflix series has been produced and he was in this building. Now the question is why was Eli Cohen a Mossad operative in a Syrian military command post? So the answer to that apparently has to do with the fact that he needed a permit from the Syrian army in order to access the Golan. The Golan obviously strategic now as it was then and in order for Eli Cohen to look around this area under his under his cover he needed to get a permit and the fact that he was able to literally do this walk into a military headquarters is regarded as testimony to firstly how on the kind of terms he must have been with the Syrian army, how effective he was as an intelligence operative and basically how much he did in service of Israel and played a huge role undoubtedly both in the Six-Day War and intelligence that has informed Israeli operations for all the time since then. So this is the Syrian army headquarters just if you are there are families visiting here but it's a little bit staircase without railings that sort of thing so if you are going to come here just do be careful a little some hazards definitely and come up to the roof if you're interested in borders and look towards this side the side where you have all the wind turbines on and open up Google Maps and you can see where you're facing and this is as I mentioned we're looking into Syria for veteran border spotter is one clue that this is a border is those yellow fences are typically are where closed military zones are right next to the border and if you can zoom in on my I'll zoom in on my camera but you can't really see it was the naked eye there is the border fence there in some warnings as well and a couple of outposts on the other side. The Syrian army headquarters is located two kilometers to the west of Qunaytra in Syria but if you want to visit this you have to come from the Israeli side so it's close to Haar Bental, Mount Bental and if you do want to get more videos from me about the various interesting things I find in my locality in Jerusalem and further afield in Israel then do please consider subscribing to this YouTube channel and thank you for watching the video