[News] Israel’s latest bombing of Syria, explained

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Israel’s latest bombing of Syria, explained
Qassam Muaddi
July 17, 2025
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Israeli warplanes killed one and wounded at least 20 in a series of
airstrikes on Damascus, Syria, on Wednesday. The strikes included the
surroundings of the presidential palace, the Defense Ministry, and the
Syrian army’s general staff building in Ummayad Square, the dynamic center
of the Syrian capital.

In a joint statement, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed that Israel’s strikes aimed at
protecting the Druze minority community in Syria, and forcing the Syrian
government to pull its forces back from the south of the country near the
border with Israeli-occupied Syrian territory.

The strikes came shortly after forces belonging to the Syrian government
entered the southern Druze-majority city of Sweida, where local
self-defense groups have refused to lay down their arms despite demands
from the new Syrian government. Video footage on social media coming from
Sweida purported to show multiple abuses by government forces during the
takeover of the city, as well as a video of people, purportedly members of
the Druze community, raising the Israeli flag on the roof of a building.

The Syrian government’s attack on the city was ongoing when the Israeli
bombing started. Shortly after, leaders of the Druze community announced
that they had reached an agreement to lay down all the arms held by Druze
groups, and to integrate the armed groups of Sweida into the state’s forces
and ensure their participation in “maintaining order” in the city.

On Wednesday, Syrian president Ahmad Al-Sharaa said in a televised
statement that Syria “does not fear war with Israel” but chose to avoid it
for the “safety of its people.”
*Why does Israel claim the need to ‘protect’ the Druze?*

Israel’s positioning of itself as the defender and protector of the Syrian
Druze community in Sweida can be traced to the historic relationship
between the Syrian Druze and the Druze in the north of Palestine, who are
Israeli citizens. In fact, they are the same community and the same
families, though they were separated following Israel’s occupation and
colonization of Palestine.

After the Nakba and the establishment of the Israeli state, Israel struck a
deal with Palestinian Druze elders in the 1950s to draft young Druze men
into the army, granting the Druze a separate status from the rest of the
remaining Palestinians in the state of Israel. And while in recent years,
Druze youth have been increasingly refusing to serve in the army, asserting
their Palestinian identity, parts of the Druze community remain loyal to
the state, and Israel continues to leverage that.

Unlike in northern Palestine, the Druze families in the Israeli-occupied
Syrian Golden Heights never accepted Israeli citizenship and continue to
collectively reject it, and as a result, have received the same treatment
as Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory.

The people in Sweida became especially vulnerable after the civil war began
in 2011. Although they became the target of repeated attacks by rebel
groups, Israel at the time didn’t intervene or claim their protection. The
rebel groups who attacked the Druze community in Sweida at the time were
engaged in a fight to topple the Syrian government of Bashar Al-Asad, which
also was in Israel’s interest.

Although the first protests against the Assad rule in 2011 included
Druze-majority areas, like Sweida, the Druze community was largely neutral
during the war that followed, and most Druze in the south of the country
did not take part in the fighting. Between 2012 and 2015, the
multi-national, Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front advanced its control in the
south of Syria, including in the surroundings of Sweida, which pushed some
residents to form defence groups and take up arms, especially among the
Druze citizens.

The Druze defence groups clashed with Al-Nusra Front multiple times, which
at the time was led by the now-president of Syria, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, known
at the time by his nom-de-guerre Abu Mohammad Al-Joulani. At the time,
Israel did not intervene in the course of the fighting, except to grant
safe passage for Al-Nusra wounded into Israel, to be treated in Israeli
hospitals.At the time, Al-Nusra Front was leading the fight against the
Syrian state army, and to topple the Assad rule.

Israel did however, bomb Syrian army bases in the south of Syria during the
height of the civil war. Druze groups maintained their arms after the
relative calm that followed the takeover of most of the Syrian territory by
the Assad-led government, especially following attacks by ISIS on Sweida’s
surroundings in 2018.

Today, following the fall of the previous Syrian regime, Israel continues
to have the same strategic goal of clearing the south of Syria of any
Syrian State forces. And as the hostility between elements of the Syrian
forces who were in the ranks of the rebels years ago and the Druze
community rise again, the opportunity for Israel to assert its control over
the South now comes through the gate of protecting the Druze.
*What the latest escalation could mean*

Following the fall of Al-Assad in December of last year, Israeli forces
invaded Syrian territory, occupying extensive areas and approaching 12
kilometers away from Damascus. The Israeli army took new positions on
Syria’s Mount Al-Sheikh, while Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that
Israeli forces will remain in the newly conquered territory for at least
another year. Simultaneously, Israeli war planes took advantage of the
brief power vaccum that followed the fall of the Assad regime and launched
an extensive bombing campaign against Syrian army bases and warehouses,
destroying most of the Syrian state military capabilities.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu stated at the time that Israel would not
accept any military presence of the Syrian army in the south of the country
or near Israeli borders. But another old Israeli goal of pressuring Syria
was hinted at several times in the past months. In February, U.S. Middle
East envoy Steve Witkoff said that Syria and Lebanon could join the Abraham
normalization accords with Israel. Then, in May, Israeli ambassador to the
U.S., Yechiel Leiter, said in an interview to PragerU that Syria could be
closer to normalizing with Israel than Saudi Arabia was.

In May the ‘Jewish Journal’ quoted Ahmad Al-Sharaa saying that Syria and
Israel had common enemies and that they could have a security partnership.
Then in late June the U.S. Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack said that the Syrian
president wants peace with Israel.

Israel has always sought a normalization with Syria, which it tried to
achieve in the late 1990s and early 2000s, without giving Syria back the
occupied Golan heights. The fact that a new government is in power in
Damascus, with little force to impose its control over all Syrian
territory, represents an opportunity for Israel to take over more
territory, and potentially secure some sort of normalization or peace
agreement with Syria. On the Syrian side, if al-Sharaa manages to strike a
deal that would allow him to retain, or gain back some territory seized by
Israel, he would get the status of having confronted Israel and brought
Syrian territory back from under Israeli occupation.
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