<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-top-anchor"></div>
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" lang="en-US" dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/israels-latest-bombing-of-syria-explained/?ml_recipient=160264483391931765&ml_link=160264423878952419&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-07-18&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation">mondoweiss.net</a>
<div class="gmail-domain-border"></div>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Israel\u2019s latest bombing of Syria, explained</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Qassam Muaddi</div>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">July 17, 2025</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<p>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\u2019s general staff building in Ummayad Square, the dynamic
center of the Syrian capital.</p>
<p>In a joint statement, Israel\u2019s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed that Israel\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The Syrian government\u2019s 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\u2019s forces and ensure their participation in \u201cmaintaining order\u201d
in the city. </p>
<p>On Wednesday, Syrian president Ahmad Al-Sharaa said in a televised
statement that Syria \u201cdoes not fear war with Israel\u201d but chose to avoid
it for the \u201csafety of its people.\u201d</p>
<h2><strong>Why does Israel claim the need to \u2018protect\u2019 the Druze?</strong></h2>
<p>Israel\u2019s 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\u2019s occupation and colonization of Palestine. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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\u2019t 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\u2019s interest.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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\u2019s surroundings in 2018.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2><strong>What the latest escalation could mean</strong></h2>
<p>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\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>Israel\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>In May the \u2018Jewish Journal\u2019 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
<div></div>
</div>
<br></div>