WASHINGTON: The United States has said it did not support recent Israeli strikes on Syria and had clearly made its dissatisfaction, while Syrian chief Ahmed Al-Sharaa accused Israel of trying to fracture his country and promised to protect his minority from Druze.
Wednesday, Israel launched air strikes in Damascus, while hitting government forces in the South, demanding that they withdraw and said that Israel was aimed at protecting the Syrians Druze – part of a small but influential minority which also has followers in Lebanon and Israel.
The air strikes exploded part of the Ministry of Defense of Syria and struck near the presidential palace. On Thursday, the Syrian press agency said that Israel had made an air strike near Sweida in Syria, where dozens of people were killed in days of conflict between Druze fighters and government troops and Bedouin tribes.
The spokesman for the United States Department of State, Tammy Bruce, said that the United States had condemned violence in Syria and actively hired all the constituencies there and called on the Syrian government to follow the way to follow.
The members of the Syrian security forces stand on the side of a road in the Sweida campaign, while vehicles carrying other Syrian security forces come out of the city predominantly of Sweida, Syria, July 16, 2025. Reuters / Karam al-Masr
“Regarding the intervention and activity of Israel, the United States has not supported recent Israeli strikes,” she said.
“We are engaging diplomatically with Israel and Syria at the highest level, both to deal with the current crisis and reach a lasting agreement between the two sovereign states.”
Bruce refused to say if Washington maintains that Israel was carrying out such military operations when it deems it necessary.
“I will not talk about future or past conversations. What we are dealing with now is this particular episode, what was necessary, and I think that we were very clear about our dissatisfaction, certainly that President has, and we worked very quickly for arranging it,” said Bruce.
Violence highlighted the challenges that the president is active in the stabilization of Syria and by exercising a centralized rule, despite its warming ties with the United States and the evolutionary security contacts of its administration with Israel.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said there was an attempted “sabotage the ceasefire that had been made yesterday with the contributions of our country”, and that Israel had shown once again that it did not want peace or stability in Gaza or Syria.
“Israel, using the Druze as an excuse, has expanded its banditry to Syria,” he told journalists.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Turkey, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon and Egypt published a joint declaration reaffirming the support of “Syria security in its affairs.
Members of the Syrian security forces are on a road in the Sweida campaign, while vehicles carrying other Syrian security forces come out of the predominantly Sweida city, Syria, July 16, 2025. Reuters / Karam al-Masri
They also praised the agreement concluded to put an end to the Sweida crisis and underlined the need for its implementation to protect Syria and its unity.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday the United States on Wednesday, the United States had hired all parties and that measures had been accepted to end a “disturbing and horrible situation”.
Overnight, government troops withdrew from Sweida. The government sent troops earlier this week to the predominance city of Druze to repress a series of fights between the Bedouins and the Druze, but the violence then increased until a cease-fire was declared.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that the conflict de-escalation in Syria seemed to continue.
“Syria has agreed to withdraw its troops in the region where this confrontation was underway and we continue to monitor the situation very actively,” she said.
Addressing the Syrians on Thursday, Sharaa credited the American, Arab and Turkish mediation for having saved “the region of an uncertain spell”, but accused Israel of seeking to “dismantle the unity of our people”.
He declared that Israel had “constantly targeted our stability and created discord among us since the fall of the Old Regime”.
The United Nations Security Council met on Thursday to discuss Israeli strikes and the UN Russian ambassador, Vassily, Nebenzia said that “external or internal actors” could not be authorized to exploit a fragile situation in Syria by “fermenting ethnic and religious tensions”.
Israel frequently bombed Syria during the reign of the former ousted president, Bashar al-Assad, and has hit the country several times this year, describing its new leaders as barely disguised jihadists and saying that it will not allow them to deploy forces in regions of southern Syria near its border.
Sharaa, commander of an Al-Qaeda faction before reducing links with the group in 2016, said that the protection of citizens of Druze and their rights were “our priority” and rejected any attempt to drag them into the hands of an “outside party”.
The members of the Syrian security forces stand on the side of a road in the Sweida campaign, while vehicles carrying other Syrian security forces come from the predominantly city of Sweida, Syria, July 16, 2025. Reuters / Karam al-Masri
He also swore to take into account those who have committed violations against “our Druze people”.
The Syrian Human Rights network said that it had documented 254 dead in four days of fighting, including medical staff, women and children.
The head of the network, Fadel Abdulghany, told Reuters that the figure included cases of field executions by both sides, the Syrians killed by Israeli strikes and others killed in confrontations, but it would take time to break the figures in each category.
A local journalist said that he had counted more than 60 bodies in Sweida in southern Syria on Thursday morning. Ryan Marouf de Suwayda24 told Reuters that he had found a family of 12 people killed in a house, including women and an elderly man.
A resident of Sweida, who asked to be identified only by his first name, bitter, for fear of reprisals, shared a video, which Reuters could not verify independently, of his neighbors killed in their house. He showed a lifeless man on a chair, an elderly man with a ball injury to his right temple on the ground and a younger man, face down in a pool of blood.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had established a policy requiring the demilitarization of a territory strip near the border, extending from the Golanian heights occupied by Israeli in the Druze mountain, east of Sweida.
He reiterated Israel’s policy to protect the Druze.
Syria had sent “its army south of Damascus to an area which was supposed to remain demilitarized, and it began to massacre the Druze. It was something that we could in no case accept, “he said, adding:” It is a cease-fire made by force. “
In a disturbing development, a military commander for Bedouin said that their fighters had launched a new offensive in Sweida province against Druze fighters and that the truce applied only to government forces.
The Bedouins, Sunni Muslim farmers who have long-standing frictions with the Druze, sought to free up detained colleagues, he told Reuters.
In the midst of revenge attack reports against Bedouin on Thursday, the guide of Druze Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajari called for peaceful Bedouin tribes to respect and not hurt.
