Israel says its fighter jets bombed an area next to the presidential palace in Syria’s capital, Damascus, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to protect the Druze religious minority following days of deadly sectarian violence.
Netanyahu said the strike was “clear message to the Syrian regime” that Israel would “not allow the deployment of forces south of Damascus or any threat to the Druze community”.
There was no immediate response from the Syrian government.
However, it rejected “foreign intervention” when Israel carried out strikes south of Damascus on Wednesday during clashes between Druze gunmen, security forces and allied Sunni Islamist fighters.
The spiritual leader of Syria’s Druze, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, has condemned the violence as an “unjustifiable genocidal campaign” against his community and called for intervention by “international forces to maintain peace”.
The Syrian government has said it has deployed security forces to Druze areas to combat “outlaw groups” which it has accused of instigating the clashes.
Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani has also warned that “any call for external intervention, under any pretext or slogan, only leads to further deterioration and division”.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, at least 102 people have been killed this week in Ashrafiyat Sahnaya, a town in the southern outskirts of Damascus, the mainly Druze suburb of Jaramana, and the southern province of Suweida, which has a Druze majority.
It says that includes 10 Druze civilians and 21 Druze fighters, as well as another 35 Druze fighters who were shot dead in an “ambush” by security forces while travelling from Suweida to Damascus on Wednesday. Thirty members of the General Security service and allied fighters have also been killed, it says.
The violence erupted in Jaramana on Monday night after an audio clip of a man insulting the Prophet Muhammad circulated on social media and angered Sunni Muslims. It was attributed to a Druze cleric, but he denied any responsibility. The interior ministry also said a preliminary inquiry had cleared him.
The Druze faith is an offshoot of Shia Islam with its own unique identity and beliefs. Half its roughly one million followers live in Syria, where they make up about 3% of the population, while there are smaller communities in Lebanon, Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.
Syria’s transitional President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has promised to protect the country’s many religious and ethnic minorities since his Sunni Islamist group led the rebel offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December after 13 years of devastating civil war.
However, the mass killings of hundreds of civilians from Assad’s minority Alawite sect in the western coastal region in March, during clashes between the new security forces and Assad loyalists, hardened fears among minority communities.
In February, Israel’s prime minister warned that he would not “tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria” from the country’s new security forces.
Netanyahu also demanded the complete demilitarisation of Suweida and two other southern provinces, saying Israel saw Sharaa’s Sunni Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), as a threat. HTS is a former al-Qaeda affiliate that is still designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN, the US, the EU and the UK.
The Israeli military has already carried out hundreds of strikes across Syria to destroy the country’s military assets over the past four months. It has also sent troops into the UN-monitored demilitarised buffer zone between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Syria, as well as several adjoining areas and the summit of Mount Hermon.
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