Middle East
Syria’s Druze divided as sectarian tensions linger after violence | Syria’s War News
Instability has plagued Syria in the past two weeks after fighting broke out in two of Damascus’s suburbs and a southern governorate, drawing in government forces and non-state armed factions.
Using the unrest as a pretext, Israel also launched attacks on several locations in Syria.
The fighting and the Israeli attacks add to the difficulties faced by Syria’s new government – which only came to power after the fall of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad – as it attempts to rebuild Syria after nearly 14 years of war.
The violence of that war has not fully subsided. Instead, the recent fighting has taken on a sectarian character, though locals also told Al Jazeera that some actors were motivated by power as they try to carve out spheres of influence in the new Syria.
Violence
The recent clashes began on April 28 in the town of Jaramana, on the outskirts of Damascus, before spreading to nearby Ashrafiyat Sahnaya and the southern governorate of Sweida, where many of the country’s Druze population live.
All of the areas have significant Druze populations, and the violence began after attackers were incensed by a blasphemous audio recording criticising the Prophet Muhammad, attributed to a religious leader from the minority group.
The religious leader denied the recording was in his voice, and an investigation by Syria’s Ministry of the Interior has concurred. But it mattered little, as fighting between local armed Druze groups and outsiders began.
The violence was followed by several Israeli attacks, including one near Syria’s presidential palace in Damascus. Syria’s government called it a “dangerous escalation”.
Israel’s military has struck Syria hundreds of times since the fall of al-Assad, while Syria has yet to retaliate and has indicated that it has been involved in non-direct talks with Israel to calm the situation.
Israel has attempted to portray its latest attacks in Syria as evidence that it is a defender of the Druze, many of whom live in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a joint statement with Defense Minister Israel Katz, saying the attack was “a clear message to the Syrian regime: We will not allow [Syrian] forces to deploy south of Damascus or any threat to the Druze community.”
But many officials in Syria’s Druze community have expressed an openness to working with the new authority in Damascus and denied Israel’s overtures that claim to protect them.
Sources told Al Jazeera that these recent clashes have not altered that view on Israel.
“Israel is protecting its own interests,” Ali Jarbou, a professor at Damascus University and a member of a prominent Druze family, told Al Jazeera. “They are not protecting anyone. Not the Druze or anyone else.”
Experts have said Israel prefers to have weak states on its borders, and is therefore attacking Syria to weaken the new government and prevent it from exercising its power over the whole country. Allying with regional minority groups may also appear attractive to some in Israel, although a similar strategy in the past, most notably in Lebanon during the 1975-1990 civil war, failed.
But the Israeli government is also facing internal pressure to act from its own Druze community, the vast majority of whom are supportive of the Israeli state and serve in the Israeli army, despite being Arabic-speaking.
Druze diversity
The Druze community in the Middle East is split between Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and a small community in Jordan. They have played an influential role across these countries – in Syria, one of the leaders of the country’s independence was a famous Druze named Sultan al-Atrash.
Syria’s Druze are mostly split between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Mount Hermon, Sweida (in an area called Jabal al-Druze, or Mountain of the Druze), and a couple of Damascus’s suburbs, while there is also a small community near Idlib.
Syrians in the occupied Golan Heights live under Israeli authority but most have rejected offers of Israeli citizenship. They’ve also historically been able to keep ties to Syria, sometimes studying in Damascus or marrying across the border, according to Tobias Lang, director of the Austrian Centre for Peace, who has extensively studied the Druze community in the Levant.
The Druze in Syria are, however, “very fragmented politically”, Lang said, due to years of life under the al-Assad dictatorship.
“No distinct Druze leadership was allowed to emerge, and the traditional leadership lost much of its power to the Baathist regime,” he said, referring to the Baath party, which ruled Syria from 1963 to 2024.
During the war in Syria, competing voices emerged within the Druze community. Some, like Hikmat al-Hijri, the top Druze religious figure in Syria, initially supported the al-Assad regime. Others, like Wahid al-Balous, founder of the Men of Dignity Movement, split off from the regime much earlier and refused to send local men to die in support of the government.
Al-Balous was later assassinated in 2015. Opposition figures blamed the regime.
In 2023, when antigovernment protests erupted in Sweida, al-Hijri finally turned against al-Assad and supported the local opposition.
Al-Hijri has also been sharply critical of the new Syrian authorities since the outbreak of violence last month, calling the attacks against the Druze a “genocidal campaign”.
“We no longer trust a group that calls itself a government, because the government doesn’t kill its own people through extremist gangs that are loyal to it, and after the massacre claims they are loose forces,” al-Hijri said.
The Syrian government has denied any involvement in the attacks on the Druze, and has instead emphasised that its forces have sought to provide security and prevent any further sectarian attacks.
‘We’re scared of our neighbours’
Agreements struck between local actors and the new government at the start of this month have ended the fighting for now. But dozens of people had been killed, many civilians among them.
In Jaramana, locals are still on high alert.
“We’re scared of our neighbours,” a resident told Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity for fear of retaliation against them or their family.
In the early days after the fall of al-Assad, places like Jaramana and Sweida were hesitant to work with the new Syrian government. Local leaders, some of whom are Druze notables, demanded a say in local governance and security matters.
But members of the Druze community have now been working with the central authority in Damascus to calm tensions, resolve disputes, and negotiate security arrangements.
Some of those agreements will see locals join the new government’s internal security force and police their own areas under the central government’s authority.
Still, locals are on edge after the clashes and fear they could restart. Locals told Al Jazeera that some Syrians, particularly from minority sects like the Druze, have had their faith in the new central authority shaken.
“Trust [in the new government] began to decrease after the events on the coast,” Jarbou said, referring to attacks in early March on Alawite – another minority community – in the coastal region after government forces were attacked. Hundreds were killed, many of them civilians, and while the government quickly announced an investigation into the attacks, the violence provided evidence for those fearful of the new order in Syria.
That is perhaps understandable after 14 years of war and more than five decades of brutal dictatorship.
“In other words, we can say that the war hasn’t stopped,” Jarbou said, adding that a serious, participatory political solution is needed for the country. Should that not come to pass, the current pattern of clashes and increased communal tensions will only worsen.
“Sedition is raging,” he said. “It’s not that we’re afraid of sedition. We’re in sedition now.”
Middle East
Palestinian journalist among two killed in Israeli attack on Gaza hospital | Israel-Palestine conflict News
Hassan Eslaih has been killed in Nasser Hospital during treatment for injuries sustained in the previous Israeli attack.
Israel’s army has admitted to carrying out “a targeted attack” on the Nasser Medical Complex in the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, killing two people, including Palestinian journalist Hassan Eslaih.
Gaza’s Government Media Office on Tuesday confirmed the killing of Eslaih, who was receiving treatment at the hospital’s burn unit for severe injuries sustained during an April 7 Israeli strike on a media tent located next to the hospital.
The AFP news agency footage from Nasser Hospital after Tuesday’s strike showed smoke rising from the facility as rescuers searched through the rubble by the light of torches.
A hospital worker who gave his name as Abu Ghali said the Israeli bombardment “does not differentiate between civilians and military targets”.
“This is a civilian hospital that receives injured people around the clock,” he told AFP.
Eslaih was the director of the Alam24 News Agency and a freelancer who contributed to international news organisations, including photos of the Hamas-led October 7 attack.
Israel has claimed Eslaih was a Hamas fighter who participated in the October 7 attack, an allegation he vehemently denied.
Dozens of journalists killed
At least 178 journalists and media workers have been killed in Palestine, Israel, and Lebanon since the war began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Gaza’s Government Media Office put the death toll at 215.
Israel’s military said in a post on Telegram that the strike targeted a Hamas “command and control complex” at the hospital – the largest in southern Gaza – without providing further evidence.
“The compound was used by the terrorists to plan and execute terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and [military] troops,” the post said, in what appeared to be a reference to Eslaih and Hamas.
Gaza’s Health Ministry on Tuesday condemned “the repeated targeting of hospitals and the pursuit and killing of wounded patients inside treatment rooms”, saying it “confirms Israel’s deliberate intent to inflict greater damage to the healthcare system”.
Hospitals in Gaza have been a frequent target of Israeli attacks since the war began in October 2023, although attacking health facilities, medical personnel and patients is illegal under the 1949 Geneva Convention.
According to officials in Gaza, Israel has bombed and burned at least 36 hospitals across the enclave since the war erupted.
Middle East
Campaigners take UK to court over export of F-35 components to Israel | Israel-Palestine conflict News
The United Kingdom’s government faces a High Court challenge over the export of F-35 jet components used by Israel.
Co-claimants Al-Haq, a Palestinian rights organisation, and the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) are behind the case.
“We’re going to court to try to force the government to stop supplying F-35 components to Israel,” Jennine Walker, a lawyer with GLAN and the legal firm Bindmans, representing Al-Haq, told Al Jazeera.
The four-day case is set to begin on Tuesday, as Israel’s onslaught in Gaza continues with the aid of F-35 jets, having already killed more than 61,700 people.
Here’s what you need to know:
What’s happening?
In September 2024, the UK suspended about 30 out of 350 arms export licences to Israel following a review that found there was “a clear risk certain military exports to Israel might be used in violations of international humanitarian law”, according to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
But it carved out an exception for F-35 jet components, citing the F-35 global programme’s importance to international security. The parts, however, would not be sent directly to Israel, the government said.
Al-Haq and GLAN argue that the government is breaking domestic and international law through a loophole by allowing the parts to be supplied to Israel via the global spares pool and F-35 partner countries, “despite the [International Court of Justice] finding that there is plausible risk of genocide being committed against Palestinians in Gaza”.
The UK reportedly provides about 15 percent of the components in the F-35 fighter jets used by Israel.
The case has taken on new significance after a report last week by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Progressives International and Workers for a Free Palestine suggested F-35 parts are still being sent directly to Israel as of March 2025.
“Despite the September 2024 suspension of direct shipments of F-35 components from the UK to Israel, the data suggest such shipments are ongoing as of March 2025”, the report said, citing Israeli tax authority data.
From Tuesday until Friday, High Court judges will examine whether the government’s decision to suspend some but not all arms licences for export to Israel was legally correct.
Al Jazeera understands the judicial review will focus on the carve-out for F-35 jet parts. The campaigners have said they aim to ensure the UK government “urgently suspends all arms exports to Israel”, while accusing the UK of “complicity” in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
What will the campaigners argue?
Co-claimants Al-Haq and GLAN applied for a judicial review into arms export licences to Israel in December 2023, citing violations carried out by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
They say F-35 jets have plausibly been involved in war crimes.
“We know Israel is using the F-35 jets to bomb civilians. For example [in] the attack on March 18 which broke the ceasefire, and this wouldn’t be possible without the UK’s help,” Walker said.
“Hundreds of civilians died,” Walker said, referring to one of the deadliest days across Gaza when Israeli assaults killed more than 400 people. “We know every F-35 jet has some British parts.”
What’s the UK’s position?
In a statement sent to Al Jazeera, a spokesperson with the UK’s Foreign Office said, “This government has suspended relevant licences for the [Israeli army] that might be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.”
The spokesperson added that of the remaining licences for Israel, the “vast majority” are not for the Israeli army but for “civilian purposes or re-export, and therefore are not used in the war in Gaza”.
The spokesperson reiterated the government’s position that the F-35 programme exemption was “due to its strategic role in NATO and wider implications for international peace and security”, adding that “any suggestion that the UK is licensing other weapons for use by Israel in the war in Gaza is misleading”.
Which other groups are involved in the case?
Oxfam, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are assisting the court by submitting written evidence.
Oxfam’s intervention is based on its documentation of the destruction caused by Israeli fire on water sanitation and health facilities.
Akshaya Kumar, the director of crisis advocacy at Human Rights Watch, raised the idea of criminal responsibility, referencing the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal.
“If you are a supplier, you are aiding and abetting the continued assault, the continued air strikes. You are part of that criminal responsibility,” she said.
Elizabeth Rghebi, the MENA advocacy director at Amnesty International USA, argued that several states have either been unwilling to observe international legal obligations or have claimed that the structure of the F-35 programme makes it impossible to apply arms controls to the end-user, “which would make the entire programme incompatible with international law”.
What is the scale of damage from Israeli air strikes in Gaza?
Israel’s latest military assault on Gaza began shortly after October 7, 2023, when Hamas, the group that governs the Strip, led an incursion into southern Israel, during which 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 were taken captive.
Israel has failed to achieve its stated aim of crushing Hamas, while its aerial bombardment from jets, including the F-35, has decimated civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, mosques and churches.
Emeritus professor Paul Rogers from the University of Bradford said, “In terms of tonnage dropped, most modern wars have had very high levels of tonnage used. Gaza is probably one of the worst. If you go back to the Second World War – [there was] the carpet bombing of German cities, the firebombing of Japanese cities, for that matter, and, on a smaller scale, the bombing Britain experienced during the second and third years of the war.”
He added: “So, it’s not exceptional in that sense, but the concentration of so much firepower in a very small area is very unusual. It bears comparison with some of the worst examples of modern warfare and their impact on civilians.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) has documented the woes inflicted on Gaza’s healthcare sector, including the systematic destruction of hospitals, withholding of medical supplies and the detention of doctors.
“Airstrikes and a lack of medical supplies, food, water and fuel have virtually depleted an already under-resourced health system,” the WHO said.
It added that 90 percent of housing units in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. A similar percentage of school buildings require complete reconstruction or major rehabilitation.
On May 4, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) launched a barrage of suicide drones at Port Sudan, the army’s de facto wartime capital on the Red Sea.
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) accused foreign actors of supporting the RSF’s attacks and even threatened to sever ties with one of its biggest trading partners.
The RSF surprised many with the strikes. It had used drones before, but never hit targets as far away as Port Sudan, which used to be a haven, until last week.
“The strikes … led to a huge displacement from the city. Many people left Port Sudan,” Aza Aera, a local relief worker, told Al Jazeera. “If the aggression continues … I think I’ll leave like everyone else.”
A drone war
When a civil war erupted between the SAF and RSF in April 2023, the army had aerial supremacy due to its fleet of warplanes and drones.
Yet the RSF is closing the gap with an arsenal of suicide drones, which it used on Port Sudan for six consecutive days, hitting an army base, a civilian airport, several hotels, and a fuel depot, which caused a massive blast.
“Sudan had already entered the phase of drone warfare over the last … few months at least,” said Suliman Baldo, the founder of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker think tank.
The army largely relies on the relatively affordable Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, reportedly receiving $120m worth of them since late 2023.
Bayraktars can travel long distances with a large payload, and the army says they helped it regain swaths of territory from the RSF in eastern and central Sudan between September 2024 and March 2025, including the capital Khartoum.
Despite losing significant ground, the RSF then stepped up its aggression against the SAF with Chinese-made drones, according to a recent report by Amnesty International.
The human rights group, Sudan’s de facto military government and other monitors all accuse the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of purchasing these drones – and other weapons – and supplying them to the RSF.
The UAE has denied the accusations as “baseless”.
“The UAE strongly rejects the suggestion that it is supplying weapons to any party involved in the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” said Salem Aljaberi, a spokesperson for the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement on X.
Regardless, the increasing use of drones by both sides marks an escalation and risks exacerbating an already catastrophic situation for civilians, according to experts and human rights monitors.
Bold announcement
On May 6, the army-backed authorities in Port Sudan announced the severing of all ties with the UAE after accusing it of being behind the attacks.
That announcement was not well thought-out, according to Baldo.
Sudan’s army could lose tens of millions of dollars in gold revenue, as well as access to vital banking operations, he told Al Jazeera.
A UAE-backed company, Emiral Resources, owns a majority of shares in Sudan’s largest gold mine, the Kush mine.
Kush is administered by Sudan’s army, which likely sells tens of millions of dollars worth of gold to the UAE.
According to the Central Bank of Sudan, about 97 percent of gold exports from army-controlled areas went to the UAE in 2023.
Kush exported at least one tonne of gold in 2024, although it is unclear how much higher the number is for production.
Furthermore, UAE banks own a majority share in the Bank of Khartoum, whose digital platform, Bankak, facilitates money transfers for millions of displaced Sudanese and public institutions.
The UAE state also owns El Nilein Bank, which manages and approves international transactions on behalf of Port Sudan, according to a report that Baldo co-authored in March for the Chatham House think tank.
“This was a rushed decision [to cut ties with the UAE] that will have serious consequences … due to the UAE’s control over [Sudan’s] national economy,” Baldo told Al Jazeera.
Major escalation?
Sudan’s army has not clarified how and when it will sever ties with the UAE.
On May 6, SAF chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan vowed in a video to “defeat the militia (RSF) and those who help them”.
Al Jazeera sent written questions to army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah, asking if Port Sudan will implement the announced suspension.
No reply was received by time of publication.
For its part, the UAE’s Foreign Ministry told Al Jazeera in an email that it will not retaliate against Port Sudan.
“The statement issued by the so-called ‘Security and Defence Council’ will not affect the deep-rooted and enduring ties between the UAE and the Republic of the Sudan, and their peoples,” the emailed statement said.
Meanwhile, experts and observers believe the war in Sudan is trending towards a major escalation.
The army’s regional backers could respond to the RSF’s increased use of drones by doubling down on their support for the army, warned Alan Boswell, a Sudan expert for the International Crisis Group.
“The obvious risk [from the attacks on Port Sudan] is that it brings other [regional powers] into deeper involvement on the army’s side,” he told Al Jazeera.
“We could see an escalating war with greater and greater firepower, and nothing would be left of Sudan’s infrastructure by the end of it.”
