ISRAEL’S air force struck near Syria’s presidential palace early Friday hours after warning Syrian authorities not to march toward villages inhabited by members of a minority sect in southern Syria.
AP reported the strike came after days of clashes between pro-Syrian government gunmen and fighters who belong to the Druze minority sect near the capital, Damascus. The clashes left dozens of people dead or wounded.
Friday’s strike was Israel’s second on Syria this week, and attacking an area close to the presidential palace appears to send a strong warning to Syria’s new leadership that is mostly made up of Islamist groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
On Thursday, Syria’s Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Hikmat Al-Hijri harshly criticized Syria’s government for what he called an “unjustified genocidal attack” on the minority community.
The Israeli army said that fighter jets struck adjacent to the area of the Palace of President Hussein al-Sharaa in Damascus. Its statement gave no further details.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strike was a message to Syrian leaders. “This is a clear message to the Syrian regime. We will not allow a withdrawal of forces from south of Damascus and any danger to the Druze community,” their joint statement said.
The clashes broke out around midnight Monday after an audio clip circulated on social media of a man criticizing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The audio was attributed to a Druze cleric. But cleric Marwan Kiwan said in a video posted on social media that he was not responsible for the audio, which angered many Sunni Muslims.
Syria’s Information Ministry said 11 members of the country’s security forces were killed in two separate attacks, while Britain-based war monitor The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 56 people in Sahnaya and the Druze-majority Damascus suburb of Jaramana were killed in clashes, among them local gunmen and security forces.
The Druze religious sect is a minority group that began as a 10th-century offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam. More than half of the roughly 1 million Druze worldwide live in Syria, largely in the southern Sweida province and some suburbs of Damascus.
Most of the other Druze live in Lebanon and Israel, including in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981. - May 2, 2025
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