Israel attacks Syria after clashes involving minority Druze community

Three Israeli airstrikes targeted different parts of Suwayda’s countryside, Syria’s state-run news agency Sana reported.

Israel launched attacks in southern Syria on Monday after deadly clashes that involved the Druze community, a minority group that the Jewish state has pledged to protect. 

Israel has periodically bombed its neighbor’s military infrastructure since the December ouster of President Bashar Al-Assad. (AFP)

The Israel Defense Forces struck several tanks advancing toward Suwayda province, where confrontations broke out Sunday and persisted into Monday. “The IDF struck the tanks in order to prevent their arrival to the area,” the army said on Telegram. 

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz described the strikes as a “clear warning” to the Syrian regime that Israel would not allow the Druze to be harmed.

Three Israeli airstrikes targeted different parts of Suwayda’s countryside, Syria’s state-run news agency Sana reported. Israel has periodically bombed its neighbor’s military infrastructure since the December ouster of President Bashar Al-Assad. 

The violence in Suwayda, where the Druze are concentrated, killed about 100 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It said Druze groups battled with tribal fighters as well as state military and police forces.

A spokesman for Syria’s defense ministry, Hassan Abdul-Ghani, said government troops were deployed in Suwayda to end the violence that had erupted earlier. Attacks from armed men killed 18 members of the state forces, he added.

In May, Israel struck a target near the presidential palace in the Syrian capital Damascus after the Druze community in both countries called for help following a series of violent clashes between the minority group and Syrian state forces.

After that strike, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz said they would not allow any threat to the Druze, an ethnically Arab group whose faith is an offshoot of Islam. 

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, whose Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group led an Islamist uprising against Assad, has been trying to prevent violence that flared up in Syria a few months after the downfall of his predecessor. He has been seeking to seize all weapons and dissolve armed factions in the country.

In March, armed men that the authorities said were affiliated with the ousted regime attacked security sites and state premises along Syria’s Mediterranean coast. This stirred up violence against the Muslim Alawite minority, to which Assad belongs. Three months later, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a church in eastern Damascus, killing 22.