A ceasefire agreement has come into effect in the Druze suburbs of Damascus - Jaramana and Sahna - after two days of clashes there.
This was reported by the Syria TV channel, citing the governor of As-Suwayda province, Mustafa al-Baqour, who spoke after a meeting of the delegation of the country's new authorities with elders of the Druze community near Damascus.
“An agreement has been reached to extradite to law enforcement agencies the criminals who carried out attacks on patrols of the Syrian security forces, which led to the deaths of about 20 officers“, noted he. According to the governor, the meeting participants also condemned Israel's intervention in the events in southern Damascus, which "aims to provoke civil conflict".
On Wednesday, Israeli Air Force drones struck points where security forces controlled by the new Syrian authorities are deployed, participating in an operation to restore order in the southwestern suburbs of Damascus.
For its part, the Israel Defense Forces said that, on the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz, they carried out a preemptive strike against armed radicals in Syria who were preparing an attack on Druze militias. Netanyahu's office noted that a "stern warning" had been sent to Damascus that violence against the local Druze community must stop. The statement stressed that Israel is "committed to protecting the Druze and will not allow attacks against them in Syria."
The Druze are a distinct Arabic-speaking ethno-confessional group whose representatives live in Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. There are 700,000 Druze in Syria, making them the third largest religious and ethnic minority after the Kurds and Alawites.