[2025, August 24: [/b] Many years ago the Aga Khan IV said he would mediate in the Palestine matter but only if both parties asked him. Now, kids in Gaza (or AI) have made a video of them asking for the intervention of the Aga Khan V in humanitarian aid to the children of Gaza.
VIDEO: https://ismaili.net/timeline/2025/2025-08-25-gaza.mp4
THE MIDDLE EAST
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swamidada786
- Posts: 250
- Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2025 8:56 pm
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
6 Sep, 2025 21:16
HomeWorld News
Israel backs away from West Bank annexation plan after UAE warning – WaPo
West Jerusalem was taken by “surprise” by the admonition, the Washington Post has reported
Press / Mamoun Wazwaz
A public warning from the United Arab Emirates prompted the Israeli government to drop a planned discussion on annexing the West Bank, the Washington Post has reported. A senior UAE diplomat reportedly told Israeli media earlier this week that such a move would be a “red line” that would block Israel’s path to regional integration.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to discuss the issue at a major government meeting on Friday, according to local media. On Wednesday, UAE special envoy Lana Nusseibeh told the Times of Israel that annexation would “foreclose the idea of regional integration.”
“For every Arab capital you talk to, the idea of regional integration is still a possibility, but annexation to satisfy some of the radical extremist elements in Israel is going to take that off the table,” she stated.
The UAE was the first Arab nation to normalize relations with Israel in over a quarter century under the Abraham Accords brokered by President Donald Trump during his first term in office.
Israeli ministers call on Netanyahu to annex West Bank
Read more Israeli ministers call on Netanyahu to annex West Bank
The public warning from Abu Dhabi “came as a surprise,” an Israeli official told the Post, calling the situation “very unusual.”
On Thursday, the issue of annexation was removed from the Israeli ministerial meeting agenda, according to the newspaper.
Washington has not taken a stance on the issue so far. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described potential annexation as “not a final thing” earlier this week, adding that he was “not going to opine on that.”
The West Bank returned to the spotlight earlier this year after a group of Israeli ministers urged that the territory be formally annexed. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed control could be asserted at any moment.
Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and has been actively building settlements there – which is widely regarded as illegal by the international community. It was close to annexation in 2020 but dropped the idea in exchange for normalizing relations with the UAE and Bahrain.
https://www.rt.com/news/624223-israel-w ... ation-uae/
HomeWorld News
Israel backs away from West Bank annexation plan after UAE warning – WaPo
West Jerusalem was taken by “surprise” by the admonition, the Washington Post has reported
Press / Mamoun Wazwaz
A public warning from the United Arab Emirates prompted the Israeli government to drop a planned discussion on annexing the West Bank, the Washington Post has reported. A senior UAE diplomat reportedly told Israeli media earlier this week that such a move would be a “red line” that would block Israel’s path to regional integration.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to discuss the issue at a major government meeting on Friday, according to local media. On Wednesday, UAE special envoy Lana Nusseibeh told the Times of Israel that annexation would “foreclose the idea of regional integration.”
“For every Arab capital you talk to, the idea of regional integration is still a possibility, but annexation to satisfy some of the radical extremist elements in Israel is going to take that off the table,” she stated.
The UAE was the first Arab nation to normalize relations with Israel in over a quarter century under the Abraham Accords brokered by President Donald Trump during his first term in office.
Israeli ministers call on Netanyahu to annex West Bank
Read more Israeli ministers call on Netanyahu to annex West Bank
The public warning from Abu Dhabi “came as a surprise,” an Israeli official told the Post, calling the situation “very unusual.”
On Thursday, the issue of annexation was removed from the Israeli ministerial meeting agenda, according to the newspaper.
Washington has not taken a stance on the issue so far. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described potential annexation as “not a final thing” earlier this week, adding that he was “not going to opine on that.”
The West Bank returned to the spotlight earlier this year after a group of Israeli ministers urged that the territory be formally annexed. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed control could be asserted at any moment.
Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and has been actively building settlements there – which is widely regarded as illegal by the international community. It was close to annexation in 2020 but dropped the idea in exchange for normalizing relations with the UAE and Bahrain.
https://www.rt.com/news/624223-israel-w ... ation-uae/
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swamidada786
- Posts: 250
- Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2025 8:56 pm
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
Reuters
Saudi Arabia, nuclear-armed Pakistan sign mutual defence pact
Maha El Dahan and Saeed Shah
Updated Thu, September 18, 2025 at 4:13 AM CDT·
DUBAI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan signed a mutual defence pact late on Wednesday, significantly strengthening a decades-old security partnership a week after Israel's strikes on Qatar upended the diplomatic calculus in the region.
The enhanced defence ties come as Gulf Arab states grow increasingly wary about the reliability of the United States as a security guarantor.
Asked whether Pakistan would now be obliged to provide Saudi Arabia with a nuclear umbrella, a senior Saudi official told Reuters: "This is a comprehensive defensive agreement that encompasses all military means."
Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed, Muslim-majority nation, and also fields the Islamic world's largest army, which it has regularly said is focused on facing down neighbouring foe India.
The agreement was the culmination of years of discussions, the Saudi official said when asked about the timing of the deal. "This is not a response to specific countries or specific events but an institutionalisation of long-standing and deep cooperation between our two countries," the official added.
Israel's attempt on September 9 to kill the political leaders of Hamas with airstrikes on Doha, while they were discussing a proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza that Qatar is helping to mediate, infuriated Arab countries.
Before the Gaza war, Gulf monarchies - U.S. allies - had sought to stabilise ties with both Iran and Israel to resolve longstanding security concerns. Over the past year, Qatar has been subjected to direct hits twice, once by Iran and once by Israel.
Israel is widely understood to possess a sizeable nuclear arsenal but maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying possessing such weapons.
Pakistan had said its nuclear weapons are only aimed, as a deterrent, against India, and its missiles are designed with a range to hit anywhere to its east in India.
NUCLEAR UMBRELLA
Pakistani state television showed Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler, embracing after signing the agreement. Also there was Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, regarded as the country's most powerful person.
"The agreement states that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both," a statement from the Pakistani prime minister's office said.
Pakistan's decades-old alliance with Saudi Arabia - the site of Islam's holiest sites - is rooted in shared faith, strategic interests and economic interdependence.
Pakistan has long had soldiers deployed in Saudi Arabia, currently estimated at between 1,500 and 2,000 troops, providing operational, technical and training help to the Saudi military. That includes assistance to the Saudi air and land forces.
Saudi Arabia has loaned Pakistan $3 billion, a deal extended in December, to shore up its foreign exchange reserves.
The Saudi deal comes months after Pakistan fought a brief military conflict with India in May.
India's ministry of external affairs spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal said in a post on X on Thursday that India was aware of the development, and that it would study its implications for New Delhi's security and for regional stability.
The senior Saudi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged the need to balance relations with Pakistan and India, also a nuclear power.
"Our relationship with India is more robust than it has ever been. We will continue to grow this relationship and seek to contribute to regional peace whichever way we can."
Pakistan and India fought three major wars since the two countries were carved out of British colonial India in 1947.
After they both acquired nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, their conflicts have been more limited in scale because of the danger of nuclear assets coming into play.
(Reporting by Saeed Shah in Islamabad and Maha El Dahan in Dubai; additional reporting by Sudipto Ganguly in Mumbai; Writing by Yousef Saba and Ariba Shahid; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Christian Schmollinger and Andrew Heavens)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ar ... 59064.html
Saudi Arabia, nuclear-armed Pakistan sign mutual defence pact
Maha El Dahan and Saeed Shah
Updated Thu, September 18, 2025 at 4:13 AM CDT·
DUBAI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan signed a mutual defence pact late on Wednesday, significantly strengthening a decades-old security partnership a week after Israel's strikes on Qatar upended the diplomatic calculus in the region.
The enhanced defence ties come as Gulf Arab states grow increasingly wary about the reliability of the United States as a security guarantor.
Asked whether Pakistan would now be obliged to provide Saudi Arabia with a nuclear umbrella, a senior Saudi official told Reuters: "This is a comprehensive defensive agreement that encompasses all military means."
Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed, Muslim-majority nation, and also fields the Islamic world's largest army, which it has regularly said is focused on facing down neighbouring foe India.
The agreement was the culmination of years of discussions, the Saudi official said when asked about the timing of the deal. "This is not a response to specific countries or specific events but an institutionalisation of long-standing and deep cooperation between our two countries," the official added.
Israel's attempt on September 9 to kill the political leaders of Hamas with airstrikes on Doha, while they were discussing a proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza that Qatar is helping to mediate, infuriated Arab countries.
Before the Gaza war, Gulf monarchies - U.S. allies - had sought to stabilise ties with both Iran and Israel to resolve longstanding security concerns. Over the past year, Qatar has been subjected to direct hits twice, once by Iran and once by Israel.
Israel is widely understood to possess a sizeable nuclear arsenal but maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying possessing such weapons.
Pakistan had said its nuclear weapons are only aimed, as a deterrent, against India, and its missiles are designed with a range to hit anywhere to its east in India.
NUCLEAR UMBRELLA
Pakistani state television showed Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler, embracing after signing the agreement. Also there was Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, regarded as the country's most powerful person.
"The agreement states that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both," a statement from the Pakistani prime minister's office said.
Pakistan's decades-old alliance with Saudi Arabia - the site of Islam's holiest sites - is rooted in shared faith, strategic interests and economic interdependence.
Pakistan has long had soldiers deployed in Saudi Arabia, currently estimated at between 1,500 and 2,000 troops, providing operational, technical and training help to the Saudi military. That includes assistance to the Saudi air and land forces.
Saudi Arabia has loaned Pakistan $3 billion, a deal extended in December, to shore up its foreign exchange reserves.
The Saudi deal comes months after Pakistan fought a brief military conflict with India in May.
India's ministry of external affairs spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal said in a post on X on Thursday that India was aware of the development, and that it would study its implications for New Delhi's security and for regional stability.
The senior Saudi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged the need to balance relations with Pakistan and India, also a nuclear power.
"Our relationship with India is more robust than it has ever been. We will continue to grow this relationship and seek to contribute to regional peace whichever way we can."
Pakistan and India fought three major wars since the two countries were carved out of British colonial India in 1947.
After they both acquired nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, their conflicts have been more limited in scale because of the danger of nuclear assets coming into play.
(Reporting by Saeed Shah in Islamabad and Maha El Dahan in Dubai; additional reporting by Sudipto Ganguly in Mumbai; Writing by Yousef Saba and Ariba Shahid; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Christian Schmollinger and Andrew Heavens)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ar ... 59064.html
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
For Arab Nations With Ties to Israel, Attacks on Qatar and Gaza City Raise Anxiety
The Middle Eastern states closest to Israel see the attack on Hamas officials in Qatar and the invasion of Gaza City as warning signs of potential threats to their own security.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, on a screen at an Arab-Islamic summit in Doha, the country’s capital, convened after an Israeli strike in the city on Sept. 9.Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
By Erika Solomon
Reporting from Cairo
Sept. 22, 2025
For nearly two years, the Arab states that maintain uneasy relations with Israel have managed the war in Gaza as a political crisis, keeping up contacts despite their simmering frustrations.
The Israeli attacks on Qatar and Gaza City, within one week, now have some of those states wondering whether their own security may also be at risk.
Across the Middle East and beyond, Israel drew harsh condemnation for its Sept. 9 strike on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Gulf nation of Qatar is a firm U.S. ally that has played a leading role in trying to mediate a peace agreement to end the Gaza war.
“For Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, it would be foolish not to be concerned that there could be attacks on their country,” said H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East security expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
The attack in Qatar was followed by a ground invasion last week of densely populated Gaza City, which sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing to southern Gaza.
Israel has said it attacked Qatar as part of its policy of allowing no safe haven to Hamas, after its militants led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the Gaza war. It said it was pursuing the Gaza City offensive to root out Hamas in one of its last strongholds.
Image
A child runs up a sandy dune near a cluster of tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza.
Displaced Palestinians in the al-Mawasi area of Gaza on Sunday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Some of the angriest responses to these actions have come from Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Like Qatar, Egypt has also acted as a mediator in Gaza cease-fire negotiations.
The attack on Doha raised questions of whether Egypt, too, could be vulnerable to Israeli strikes — and whether any country in the region is truly off limits, analysts said.
At an emergency regional summit in Doha last week, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt called Israel an “enemy.” Diaa Rashwan, the leader of Egypt’s state media agency, said that was the first time he could recall an Egyptian president using that word since the peace process with Israel began in the late 1970s.
The choice, he said, was intentional.
“Our national security is under threat, and only an enemy can threaten national security,” Mr. Rashwan told the Egyptian television program Studio Extra.
Last week, as Israeli troops advanced on Gaza City with hundreds of Palestinians still sheltering there, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry warned of “catastrophic dangers.” It called the operation a “new phase of chaos as a result of Israeli recklessness and excessive arrogance.”
Like much of the Arab world, Egyptians were already seething over the war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Egypt shares a border with southern Gaza in the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian officials fear that the latest escalation of the war, which leaves people almost nowhere to flee to, could create pressure on their border by Palestinians desperate to escape.
Such a mass flight of people has long been feared by Egyptian officials, for a number of reasons. For one, they do not want to be accused of helping Israel to displace Palestinians.
Image
Palestinian children and adults in Gaza hold metal saucepans and plastic containers near big pots of food.
Palestinians waited for food aid in Khan Younis on Sunday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Domestic security concerns are just as critical. If Hamas militants managed to cross the border with refugees, it could provoke an Israeli attack on Egyptian soil. (Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medical evacuees and others who fled Gaza during the war. But it is already struggling economically and fears the added burden of taking in large numbers of additional refugees.)
And Israeli news media reported that Israel raised concerns to Washington about an Egyptian buildup of military forces in the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has neither confirmed nor denied such a buildup, and The New York Times could not independently verify it.
But Yehia el-Kadwani, a lawmaker on the Egyptian Parliament’s defense and national security committee, told The Times that such measures, if taken, would be a warning.
Displacing Palestinians “is a red line,” he said. “Egypt will take a stance if this occurs.”
Jordan, another neighboring Arab country that has had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel, is also watching Israel’s actions nervously. It shares a border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where roughly three million Palestinians live.
As more countries recognize a Palestinian state in response to the Gaza war, Israel has intensified its threats to annex large parts of the West Bank.
Jordan is concerned that Israel could then try to push Palestinians across its border with the West Bank, according to Mr. Hellyer, the Middle East security expert.
Gulf nations, too, are weighing their options in light of the latest Israeli attacks.
For decades, they saw their principal rival in the Middle East as Iran and had, in recent years, found common cause with Israel in that shared enemy. In 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Gulf nations, were among several Arab countries that normalized relations with Israel.
But the mood is rapidly changing, said Mr. Hellyer.
“Now, they see Israel as a bigger threat to Gulf and regional security,” he said.
Image
A building that has been heavily damaged in one portion.
A damaged building in Qatar after the Israeli attack on Hamas in the capital.Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Qatar never established diplomatic relations with Israel but maintained cordial ties, which included visits by Israeli officials during the Gaza cease-fire negotiations. Those ties were shattered with the attack on Doha.
Some Gulf countries are making moves that go beyond condemnations.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia announced a new “strategic defense pact” with Pakistan — a nuclear-armed country — declaring that an attack on one country was an attack on both.
Analysts said the agreement reflected, in part, a growing sense of frustration with the United States for not doing more to protect the Gulf.
In an article published on his website last week, Andreas Krieg, a Middle East expert at King’s College London, said the whole region was now at risk of plunging into the type of wider conflict not seen since the era of Arab-Israeli wars from 1948 to 1973.
In the decades since, Israel’s normalization of ties with a number of Arab countries has narrowed the conflict into an Israeli-Palestinian fight. With every Israeli escalation now, he said, the risk of drawing Arab countries into a wider conflict grows.
“Arab publics, already inflamed by Gaza, now see Israel as a concrete threat to Arabs collectively,” he wrote.
Rania Khaled contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/worl ... nians.html
The Middle Eastern states closest to Israel see the attack on Hamas officials in Qatar and the invasion of Gaza City as warning signs of potential threats to their own security.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, on a screen at an Arab-Islamic summit in Doha, the country’s capital, convened after an Israeli strike in the city on Sept. 9.Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
By Erika Solomon
Reporting from Cairo
Sept. 22, 2025
For nearly two years, the Arab states that maintain uneasy relations with Israel have managed the war in Gaza as a political crisis, keeping up contacts despite their simmering frustrations.
The Israeli attacks on Qatar and Gaza City, within one week, now have some of those states wondering whether their own security may also be at risk.
Across the Middle East and beyond, Israel drew harsh condemnation for its Sept. 9 strike on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Gulf nation of Qatar is a firm U.S. ally that has played a leading role in trying to mediate a peace agreement to end the Gaza war.
“For Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, it would be foolish not to be concerned that there could be attacks on their country,” said H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East security expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
The attack in Qatar was followed by a ground invasion last week of densely populated Gaza City, which sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing to southern Gaza.
Israel has said it attacked Qatar as part of its policy of allowing no safe haven to Hamas, after its militants led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the Gaza war. It said it was pursuing the Gaza City offensive to root out Hamas in one of its last strongholds.
Image
A child runs up a sandy dune near a cluster of tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza.
Displaced Palestinians in the al-Mawasi area of Gaza on Sunday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Some of the angriest responses to these actions have come from Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Like Qatar, Egypt has also acted as a mediator in Gaza cease-fire negotiations.
The attack on Doha raised questions of whether Egypt, too, could be vulnerable to Israeli strikes — and whether any country in the region is truly off limits, analysts said.
At an emergency regional summit in Doha last week, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt called Israel an “enemy.” Diaa Rashwan, the leader of Egypt’s state media agency, said that was the first time he could recall an Egyptian president using that word since the peace process with Israel began in the late 1970s.
The choice, he said, was intentional.
“Our national security is under threat, and only an enemy can threaten national security,” Mr. Rashwan told the Egyptian television program Studio Extra.
Last week, as Israeli troops advanced on Gaza City with hundreds of Palestinians still sheltering there, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry warned of “catastrophic dangers.” It called the operation a “new phase of chaos as a result of Israeli recklessness and excessive arrogance.”
Like much of the Arab world, Egyptians were already seething over the war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Egypt shares a border with southern Gaza in the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian officials fear that the latest escalation of the war, which leaves people almost nowhere to flee to, could create pressure on their border by Palestinians desperate to escape.
Such a mass flight of people has long been feared by Egyptian officials, for a number of reasons. For one, they do not want to be accused of helping Israel to displace Palestinians.
Image
Palestinian children and adults in Gaza hold metal saucepans and plastic containers near big pots of food.
Palestinians waited for food aid in Khan Younis on Sunday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Domestic security concerns are just as critical. If Hamas militants managed to cross the border with refugees, it could provoke an Israeli attack on Egyptian soil. (Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medical evacuees and others who fled Gaza during the war. But it is already struggling economically and fears the added burden of taking in large numbers of additional refugees.)
And Israeli news media reported that Israel raised concerns to Washington about an Egyptian buildup of military forces in the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has neither confirmed nor denied such a buildup, and The New York Times could not independently verify it.
But Yehia el-Kadwani, a lawmaker on the Egyptian Parliament’s defense and national security committee, told The Times that such measures, if taken, would be a warning.
Displacing Palestinians “is a red line,” he said. “Egypt will take a stance if this occurs.”
Jordan, another neighboring Arab country that has had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel, is also watching Israel’s actions nervously. It shares a border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where roughly three million Palestinians live.
As more countries recognize a Palestinian state in response to the Gaza war, Israel has intensified its threats to annex large parts of the West Bank.
Jordan is concerned that Israel could then try to push Palestinians across its border with the West Bank, according to Mr. Hellyer, the Middle East security expert.
Gulf nations, too, are weighing their options in light of the latest Israeli attacks.
For decades, they saw their principal rival in the Middle East as Iran and had, in recent years, found common cause with Israel in that shared enemy. In 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Gulf nations, were among several Arab countries that normalized relations with Israel.
But the mood is rapidly changing, said Mr. Hellyer.
“Now, they see Israel as a bigger threat to Gulf and regional security,” he said.
Image
A building that has been heavily damaged in one portion.
A damaged building in Qatar after the Israeli attack on Hamas in the capital.Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Qatar never established diplomatic relations with Israel but maintained cordial ties, which included visits by Israeli officials during the Gaza cease-fire negotiations. Those ties were shattered with the attack on Doha.
Some Gulf countries are making moves that go beyond condemnations.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia announced a new “strategic defense pact” with Pakistan — a nuclear-armed country — declaring that an attack on one country was an attack on both.
Analysts said the agreement reflected, in part, a growing sense of frustration with the United States for not doing more to protect the Gulf.
In an article published on his website last week, Andreas Krieg, a Middle East expert at King’s College London, said the whole region was now at risk of plunging into the type of wider conflict not seen since the era of Arab-Israeli wars from 1948 to 1973.
In the decades since, Israel’s normalization of ties with a number of Arab countries has narrowed the conflict into an Israeli-Palestinian fight. With every Israeli escalation now, he said, the risk of drawing Arab countries into a wider conflict grows.
“Arab publics, already inflamed by Gaza, now see Israel as a concrete threat to Arabs collectively,” he wrote.
Rania Khaled contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/worl ... nians.html
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
Can the Trump Peace Plan Overcome Unprecedented Cruelty?
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza is a smart plan for turning a bomb crater into a launchpad for peace — for taking a terrible, terrible war in Gaza and leveraging it to not only create a new foundation for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and maybe even Iraq as well. If it succeeds, it could even set in motion a much-needed transformation in Iran.
Hats off to its key architects: Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Tony Blair. Without their efforts, this initiative would not have been born.
But while it may be unprecedented in its creativity, it meets a moment unprecedented in its cruelty, which makes it a long shot at best.
If only this plan were meant to solve a border dispute between Swedes and Norwegians. Alas, it is meant to halt the most vicious and deadly two years of fighting between Jews and Palestinians in the history of this conflict.
The indiscriminate murder on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas of Israelis in front of their children and children in front of their parents, on top of the kidnapping of babies and elderly people, which was met by the often indiscriminate retaliation by an Israeli army that was daily prepared to kill and maim dozens of Palestinian civilians and children to get one Hamas fighter — while grinding Gaza into rubble — may have done something no previous Israeli-Arab war ever did: It made the necessary — achieving peace — impossible.
In a lifetime of covering this conflict, I have never seen it broken into so many little pieces, each soaked in more distrust and hatred of the other than ever before. Aggregating these pieces together to implement this complex plan for a cease-fire, phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, hostage release, Palestinian prisoner release and then rebuilding of the Strip under international supervision will be a herculean task. It will require solving a diplomatic Rubik’s cube every day — while all the enemies of the deal try to scramble it every day.
I doubt Trump appreciates just how herculean an effort it will be, how much time and political capital it will require from him personally and how much he will have to squeeze both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Hamas and America’s Arab allies to do things that they not only won’t want to do, but that could be dangerous for them to do both politically and physically.
While Netanyahu said he agreed to this plan, I will believe it when I hear him saying it in Hebrew to his own people and cabinet. Friedman’s first rule of Middle East reporting: What people tell you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they say in public to their own people in their own language. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth in private. In the Middle East, officials lie in private and tell the truth in public.
And Hamas, whose surviving leadership is mostly hiding in a bunker in Doha, still has to sign on. “There are so many ways that Netanyahu or Hamas can sabotage this,” Nahum Barnea, the Yedioth Ahronoth columnist, told me — but, like me, he thinks it’s worth a try and commends those who drew up the plan.
Because it is so necessary in so many ways. For starters, anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of warfare and where it is going can see that Israelis and Arabs and Iranians cannot afford for there to be another war. Smarter and cheaper drones and even missiles are being distributed ever farther, super-empowering more actors faster.
I don’t need to remind Israelis that on June 1 more than 100 Ukrainian drones that had been smuggled into Russia struck air bases deep inside Russia, damaging or destroying at least a dozen warplanes, including long-range strategic bombers. I am guessing that this daring surprise attack cost Ukraine something closer to a big shopping spree at Best Buy than anything approaching the roughly $80 million price of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet in Israel’s fleet.
Second, Netanyahu can say all that he wants, as he did on Monday, that if Hamas does not accept this plan, “Israel will finish the job by itself” in Gaza, which Trump said he’d support. Easier said than done. If that happens, Israel will have a permanent military occupation of Gaza facing a permanent insurgency — which its own military leadership opposes. Some “finish.” That is why now that Trump has put this deal on the table, it will not be easy for Bibi or Hamas to definitively reject it.
That leads to the final reason this deal is necessary even if it seems impossible. The proliferation of social media, particularly TikTok, means that video of every single civilian casualty — every dismembered civilian — can now be broadcast to the smartphone of everyone on the planet. So, as Israel is discovering, the only way it can defeat an enemy like Hamas, embedded among civilians, is at the price of making itself a pariah among nations and having its sports teams, academics and entertainers shunned around the world.
Netanyahu can declare, with some real justification, that Israel is defending Western democratic values by defeating the Islamo-fascist Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is a terrible organization — most of all for Palestinians. But today any teenager on TikTok can also see how, at the same time, Bibi and Israel’s Jewish supremacists are perpetuating Western-style settler colonialism in the West Bank. No one is fooled — and I mean no one.
A “Pew poll, carried out in March 2025, found a significant shift in younger Republicans’ views of Israel since 2022, with views of Republicans under 50 years old becoming far more negative of Israel (50 percent) compared to 35 percent in 2022 — a 15-point shift,” according to the University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, who analyzed this and other survey data.
This peace plan is also necessary because we must not give up on a two-state solution — no matter how unlikely, because it remains the only just and rational outcome for this conflict. But we have to recognize that we cannot get there from here.
We need a bridge that builds trust where every shred of trust has been destroyed. This plan proposes to do so by effectively creating a U.N.-approved mandate for putting Gaza under the supervision of an international governing body and military force with Arab approval and input from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The logic is that until and unless Palestinians in Gaza can build and demonstrate the capacity to govern there, it is impossible to talk about a two-state solution.
But to give Palestinians the best chance to demonstrate that, they need not only international support, but also for Israel to get out of the way in Gaza, and, I would add, halt all Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank, which has been designed to erase any possibility of Palestinian sovereignty there one day. Israel must be made to leave open the possibility of Palestinian statehood if the Palestinians achieve certain governance metrics. Only Trump — whose plan acknowledges statehood “as the aspiration of the Palestinian people” — can force that upon Bibi.
But here is the hidden incentive for Israel to seize on this Trump plan. Israel’s devastating destruction of both Iran and Hezbollah’s military capacity was a tactical military victory that has opened up enormous new possibilities for regional integration.
It led to the toppling of Iran’s puppet regime in Syria and paved the way for a fragile democratic coalition to take power there. It created the space for Lebanon’s best leadership duo since the civil war — President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam — to free Lebanon’s frail democracy from the death grip of Iran and Hezbollah. It has also opened more space for the democratically elected government of Iraq to gain better control of the pro-Iranian militias there.
At the same time, it has triggered a quiet debate inside Iran about the whole efficacy of spending billions of dollars, and making Tehran an international pariah, to support losers like Hamas and Hezbollah and permanently threaten Israel.
If, if, if this Trump peace plan can create a bridge back to a two-state solution, it will give enormous leeway for Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and even Iraq to consider joining the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel.
In other words, it would turn the tactical military defeat Israel and the Trump administration inflicted on Iran in the 12-day war into a strategic achievement.
Trump actually went out of his way in his White House news conference on Monday to signal to Iran that he is open to a new relationship, if Tehran is. “Who knows, maybe even Iran can get in there,” Trump said, speaking of the Abraham Accords, with Netanyahu standing close by.
Raghida Dergham, executive chairwoman of the Beirut Institute, observed the other day in a smart essay published in Annahar Al-Arabi, that for this to happen, Israel must overcome its “siege mentality and militarized bravado” and Iran must overcome its “bazaar mentality, swinging between bluster and concession, escalation and retreat.”
Iran’s leadership, she noted, keeps moving “one step toward compromise and two steps toward escalation, still clinging to the illusion that time favors them. But beneath their defiance lies quiet panic. In this cornered state, Tehran continues to make costly miscalculations, particularly around Israel and the dwindling myths of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance,’ led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Syria, where Iran’s networks have been severed.”
If this Trump deal goes ahead, it will so isolate Iran that maybe, finally, it will also trigger a real internal struggle and change of strategy there.
My bottom line: If you are a betting person, bet that the necessary will be impossible — you have a lot of history on your side that says the closer we get to peace, the more the haters will derail it.
If you are a hoping person, hope that this time will be different.
If you are praying person, pray that everything you know about this region, its current leaders and the poisonous legacy of the Gaza war will be overcome — because somehow the key players all realize that this really is the last train to somewhere decent and the next one, and all those ever after, will be nonstops to the gates of hell.
More from Thomas L. Friedman on the Mideast
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is Making It a Pariah State https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/opin ... hamas.html
Aug. 25, 2025
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
If This Mideast War Is Over, Get Ready for Some Interesting Politics https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/opin ... hange.html
June 24, 2025
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
How to Think About What’s Happening With Iran and Israel https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/opin ... rikes.html
June 13, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/opin ... e9677ea768
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza is a smart plan for turning a bomb crater into a launchpad for peace — for taking a terrible, terrible war in Gaza and leveraging it to not only create a new foundation for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and maybe even Iraq as well. If it succeeds, it could even set in motion a much-needed transformation in Iran.
Hats off to its key architects: Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Tony Blair. Without their efforts, this initiative would not have been born.
But while it may be unprecedented in its creativity, it meets a moment unprecedented in its cruelty, which makes it a long shot at best.
If only this plan were meant to solve a border dispute between Swedes and Norwegians. Alas, it is meant to halt the most vicious and deadly two years of fighting between Jews and Palestinians in the history of this conflict.
The indiscriminate murder on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas of Israelis in front of their children and children in front of their parents, on top of the kidnapping of babies and elderly people, which was met by the often indiscriminate retaliation by an Israeli army that was daily prepared to kill and maim dozens of Palestinian civilians and children to get one Hamas fighter — while grinding Gaza into rubble — may have done something no previous Israeli-Arab war ever did: It made the necessary — achieving peace — impossible.
In a lifetime of covering this conflict, I have never seen it broken into so many little pieces, each soaked in more distrust and hatred of the other than ever before. Aggregating these pieces together to implement this complex plan for a cease-fire, phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, hostage release, Palestinian prisoner release and then rebuilding of the Strip under international supervision will be a herculean task. It will require solving a diplomatic Rubik’s cube every day — while all the enemies of the deal try to scramble it every day.
I doubt Trump appreciates just how herculean an effort it will be, how much time and political capital it will require from him personally and how much he will have to squeeze both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Hamas and America’s Arab allies to do things that they not only won’t want to do, but that could be dangerous for them to do both politically and physically.
While Netanyahu said he agreed to this plan, I will believe it when I hear him saying it in Hebrew to his own people and cabinet. Friedman’s first rule of Middle East reporting: What people tell you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they say in public to their own people in their own language. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth in private. In the Middle East, officials lie in private and tell the truth in public.
And Hamas, whose surviving leadership is mostly hiding in a bunker in Doha, still has to sign on. “There are so many ways that Netanyahu or Hamas can sabotage this,” Nahum Barnea, the Yedioth Ahronoth columnist, told me — but, like me, he thinks it’s worth a try and commends those who drew up the plan.
Because it is so necessary in so many ways. For starters, anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of warfare and where it is going can see that Israelis and Arabs and Iranians cannot afford for there to be another war. Smarter and cheaper drones and even missiles are being distributed ever farther, super-empowering more actors faster.
I don’t need to remind Israelis that on June 1 more than 100 Ukrainian drones that had been smuggled into Russia struck air bases deep inside Russia, damaging or destroying at least a dozen warplanes, including long-range strategic bombers. I am guessing that this daring surprise attack cost Ukraine something closer to a big shopping spree at Best Buy than anything approaching the roughly $80 million price of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet in Israel’s fleet.
Second, Netanyahu can say all that he wants, as he did on Monday, that if Hamas does not accept this plan, “Israel will finish the job by itself” in Gaza, which Trump said he’d support. Easier said than done. If that happens, Israel will have a permanent military occupation of Gaza facing a permanent insurgency — which its own military leadership opposes. Some “finish.” That is why now that Trump has put this deal on the table, it will not be easy for Bibi or Hamas to definitively reject it.
That leads to the final reason this deal is necessary even if it seems impossible. The proliferation of social media, particularly TikTok, means that video of every single civilian casualty — every dismembered civilian — can now be broadcast to the smartphone of everyone on the planet. So, as Israel is discovering, the only way it can defeat an enemy like Hamas, embedded among civilians, is at the price of making itself a pariah among nations and having its sports teams, academics and entertainers shunned around the world.
Netanyahu can declare, with some real justification, that Israel is defending Western democratic values by defeating the Islamo-fascist Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is a terrible organization — most of all for Palestinians. But today any teenager on TikTok can also see how, at the same time, Bibi and Israel’s Jewish supremacists are perpetuating Western-style settler colonialism in the West Bank. No one is fooled — and I mean no one.
A “Pew poll, carried out in March 2025, found a significant shift in younger Republicans’ views of Israel since 2022, with views of Republicans under 50 years old becoming far more negative of Israel (50 percent) compared to 35 percent in 2022 — a 15-point shift,” according to the University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, who analyzed this and other survey data.
This peace plan is also necessary because we must not give up on a two-state solution — no matter how unlikely, because it remains the only just and rational outcome for this conflict. But we have to recognize that we cannot get there from here.
We need a bridge that builds trust where every shred of trust has been destroyed. This plan proposes to do so by effectively creating a U.N.-approved mandate for putting Gaza under the supervision of an international governing body and military force with Arab approval and input from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The logic is that until and unless Palestinians in Gaza can build and demonstrate the capacity to govern there, it is impossible to talk about a two-state solution.
But to give Palestinians the best chance to demonstrate that, they need not only international support, but also for Israel to get out of the way in Gaza, and, I would add, halt all Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank, which has been designed to erase any possibility of Palestinian sovereignty there one day. Israel must be made to leave open the possibility of Palestinian statehood if the Palestinians achieve certain governance metrics. Only Trump — whose plan acknowledges statehood “as the aspiration of the Palestinian people” — can force that upon Bibi.
But here is the hidden incentive for Israel to seize on this Trump plan. Israel’s devastating destruction of both Iran and Hezbollah’s military capacity was a tactical military victory that has opened up enormous new possibilities for regional integration.
It led to the toppling of Iran’s puppet regime in Syria and paved the way for a fragile democratic coalition to take power there. It created the space for Lebanon’s best leadership duo since the civil war — President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam — to free Lebanon’s frail democracy from the death grip of Iran and Hezbollah. It has also opened more space for the democratically elected government of Iraq to gain better control of the pro-Iranian militias there.
At the same time, it has triggered a quiet debate inside Iran about the whole efficacy of spending billions of dollars, and making Tehran an international pariah, to support losers like Hamas and Hezbollah and permanently threaten Israel.
If, if, if this Trump peace plan can create a bridge back to a two-state solution, it will give enormous leeway for Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and even Iraq to consider joining the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel.
In other words, it would turn the tactical military defeat Israel and the Trump administration inflicted on Iran in the 12-day war into a strategic achievement.
Trump actually went out of his way in his White House news conference on Monday to signal to Iran that he is open to a new relationship, if Tehran is. “Who knows, maybe even Iran can get in there,” Trump said, speaking of the Abraham Accords, with Netanyahu standing close by.
Raghida Dergham, executive chairwoman of the Beirut Institute, observed the other day in a smart essay published in Annahar Al-Arabi, that for this to happen, Israel must overcome its “siege mentality and militarized bravado” and Iran must overcome its “bazaar mentality, swinging between bluster and concession, escalation and retreat.”
Iran’s leadership, she noted, keeps moving “one step toward compromise and two steps toward escalation, still clinging to the illusion that time favors them. But beneath their defiance lies quiet panic. In this cornered state, Tehran continues to make costly miscalculations, particularly around Israel and the dwindling myths of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance,’ led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Syria, where Iran’s networks have been severed.”
If this Trump deal goes ahead, it will so isolate Iran that maybe, finally, it will also trigger a real internal struggle and change of strategy there.
My bottom line: If you are a betting person, bet that the necessary will be impossible — you have a lot of history on your side that says the closer we get to peace, the more the haters will derail it.
If you are a hoping person, hope that this time will be different.
If you are praying person, pray that everything you know about this region, its current leaders and the poisonous legacy of the Gaza war will be overcome — because somehow the key players all realize that this really is the last train to somewhere decent and the next one, and all those ever after, will be nonstops to the gates of hell.
More from Thomas L. Friedman on the Mideast
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is Making It a Pariah State https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/opin ... hamas.html
Aug. 25, 2025
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
If This Mideast War Is Over, Get Ready for Some Interesting Politics https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/opin ... hange.html
June 24, 2025
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
How to Think About What’s Happening With Iran and Israel https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/opin ... rikes.html
June 13, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/opin ... e9677ea768
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
Saudi university jumps 250 places in global rankings
The university advanced in the 2026 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, moving over 250 places from the 601–800 range to 401–500. (Supplied)
RIYADH: Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University advanced in the 2026 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, moving more than 250 places from the 601-800 range to 401-500, highlighting its efforts to strengthen academics and research.
The progress was announced at the THE World Academic Summit hosted by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Sunday.
The improvement is attributed to the university’s focus on attracting qualified faculty, expanding research facilities and implementing quality-driven initiatives, the SPA added.
Meshari Al-Osaimi, vice rector for educational and academic affairs at the Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University. (Supplied)
Locally, it ranked fifth among Saudi universities, reinforcing its role as a leading institution for education and research.
Meshari Al-Osaimi, vice rector for educational and academic affairs, told Arab News: “The progress reflects our investments in academic talent and research facilities, along with initiatives that have enhanced the university’s reputation.”
“Nationally, the university ranked fifth among Saudi universities, underscoring its role as a leading educational and research institution,” Al-Osaimi said.
He added that this achievement reflected the university’s commitment to quality education, research and innovation, in line with Vision 2030’s goal of enhancing higher education and global competitiveness.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2618633/saudi-arabia
The university advanced in the 2026 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, moving over 250 places from the 601–800 range to 401–500. (Supplied)
RIYADH: Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University advanced in the 2026 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, moving more than 250 places from the 601-800 range to 401-500, highlighting its efforts to strengthen academics and research.
The progress was announced at the THE World Academic Summit hosted by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Sunday.
The improvement is attributed to the university’s focus on attracting qualified faculty, expanding research facilities and implementing quality-driven initiatives, the SPA added.
Meshari Al-Osaimi, vice rector for educational and academic affairs at the Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University. (Supplied)
Locally, it ranked fifth among Saudi universities, reinforcing its role as a leading institution for education and research.
Meshari Al-Osaimi, vice rector for educational and academic affairs, told Arab News: “The progress reflects our investments in academic talent and research facilities, along with initiatives that have enhanced the university’s reputation.”
“Nationally, the university ranked fifth among Saudi universities, underscoring its role as a leading educational and research institution,” Al-Osaimi said.
He added that this achievement reflected the university’s commitment to quality education, research and innovation, in line with Vision 2030’s goal of enhancing higher education and global competitiveness.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2618633/saudi-arabia
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
Firing Squads and Forced Death Leaps: A Tipping Point in Syria
Ten months after rebels toppled the long-entrenched Assad regime, little-checked bloodshed has led many Syrians to abandon hope that the years of brutality may be over.
When rebels deposed the dictator Bashar al-Assad last year, many Syrians greeted their new rulers with a mix of worry and cautious optimism.
The new government, led by a former jihadist fighter named Ahmed al-Shara, made sweeping promises to protect Syria’s many religious minorities and finally bring peace after more than a decade of civil war.
Mr. al-Shara distanced himself from his jihadist roots, including his past ties to Al Qaeda, and pledged to rein in the extremist fighters in his coalition who consider Syria’s religious minorities — Christians, Druse, Alawites and others — to be heretics.
His assurances helped him win over the United States, Europe and the Gulf nations, which backed his government with sanctions relief and financial support. Even when his forces and armed supporters of his government killed hundreds of civilians from the Assad family’s sect in March, many Syrians considered it a one-off, a brutal but expected outburst of revenge against people seen as close to the former dictatorship.
Then came the killing spree in a province called Sweida.
The bloodshed began over the summer with a feud between warring militias. But as thousands of government troops flooded into the area, ostensibly to quell the fighting, the opposite took place: a bloody rampage against civilians.
About 2,000 combatants and civilians — the vast majority from the Druse religious minority — were killed, an independent war monitor said. It was one of the deadliest outbursts of sectarian violence since Syria’s new authorities took power.
It was also a turning point for the country. To many Syrians, the massacre in Sweida made clear a pattern of government and pro-government forces targeting and killing Syrian minorities, with few repercussions.
Now, the fury over the mass killings is threatening Mr. al-Shara’s control over parts of the country.
The top Druse spiritual leader is calling for Sweida to secede from Syria altogether. Since the massacre, Druse militias have effectively barred government officials and the military from entering much of the province.
The consequences have spilled into other parts of the country, too. After the mass killings in Sweida, Kurdish minority forces in the northeast slowed their negotiations over integrating into the new government. Both regions did not take part in the parliamentary elections that began this month.
To understand what unfolded in Sweida, The New York Times interviewed dozens of witnesses and analyzed hundreds of videos of the mayhem, uncovering execution-style atrocities against civilians carried out by government forces and pro-government fighters.
The Times documented at least five separate episodes of men in military fatigues summarily executing Druse civilians, including groups of unarmed men being marched down the street to their deaths by impromptu firing squads.
Government forces wore a range of uniforms and gunmen in plainclothes sometimes fought by their side, sometimes making it difficult to pin down whether the fighters who committed the atrocities in each case were government security forces or other armed fighters who support Syria’s new leaders.
ImageMen in uniform standing around a battered city neighborhood.
Syrian security forces in Sweida in July.Credit...Karam Al-Masri/Reuters
But The Times verified that government security forces carried out at least one of the executions we documented. In two other executions, witnesses recounted that at least some of the fighters identified themselves as members of government security forces. Beyond that, government soldiers and their armed supporters often operated in tandem, and the evidence showed them committing a range of abuses against Druse civilians.
Many of the fighters filmed themselves as they carried out atrocities, posting an array of trophy videos that spread across social media and struck fear in minorities across Syria.
One of the videos verified by The Times shows fighters in military fatigues ordering three members of a Druse family onto the balcony of an apartment building and forcing them to jump to their deaths.
One of the gunmen then peers over the balcony edge, raises his arm in the air and yells, “God is great!”
In another video verified by The Times, men in fatigues point their rifles at an unarmed 60 year-old Druse man, Munir al-Rajma, as he sits on the steps of a school, demanding to know if he is Druse. Mr. al-Rajma replies that he is Syrian.
“What do you mean by Syrian? Are you Muslim or Druse?” one of the fighters yells.
“Yes, brother, I am Druse,” he responds.
The men in fatigues then open fire, killing him. “This is the fate of every dog like you, you pigs,” one of them is heard saying.
Video
Fighters filmed themselves killing Munir al-Rajma, a Druse man. The Times has shortened the video to remove the moment he was executed.
Nearly all of the civilians killed in the violence were Druse, independent monitors have concluded. But Druse men also took up arms, carrying out killings and committing some atrocities as well.
Druse fighters killed at least three civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group. In one case, they paraded what they described as the bodies of government soldiers through the streets.
Of the roughly 2,000 people killed in all, nearly 1,000 were Druse civilians and at least five were Bedouin civilians, according to the Observatory.
The Syrian government has condemned the violence and pledged to investigate reports of “shocking and serious violations committed by an unknown group wearing military uniforms in Sweida.”
Mr. al-Shara also vowed to hold the perpetrators accountable, pledging to “bring every hand stained with the blood of innocents to justice,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in September. Government officials formed a fact-finding committee in July to investigate the atrocities, and they have offered their support to U.N. investigators carrying out their own inquiry. The Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment on the findings of The Times’s investigation.
The government’s assurances have not tempered fears among the Druse, or their calls for secession.
“The right to self-determination is a sacred right,” the spiritual leader, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, announced last month. “We will not retreat from it — no matter the sacrifices.”
The Tension
For decades, sectarian tension has simmered — and erupted — with disastrous consequences for Syria.
The country is a patchwork of ethnicities and religions, with a majority Sunni Muslim population living among Shiite Muslims, Christians, Druse and the Assad family’s sect, Alawites, which held enormous sway under dictatorial rule.
During the Assads’ more than 50-year reign, their government fanned sectarian fears to retain power, claiming that the Sunni majority reviled all Syrian minorities. The government, with many Alawites dominating its upper echelons, portrayed itself as the sole protector of Syria’s minorities.
The civil war hardened those divides, with some of the largely Sunni Muslim rebels embracing a jihadist line. Then, when Mr. al-Shara deposed the Assad regime late last year, a Sunni-led government was in power for the first time in decades — and many Syrian minorities felt extremely vulnerable.
Mr. al-Shara tried to ease their concerns, proclaiming a new Syria, safe for everyone. Yet his government struggled to merge his disparate assortment of rebels into a disciplined national army. A new Sunni Muslim nationalism began to emerge, emboldening Sunni extremists across the country.
In a few short months, the dam burst.
Government forces took part in a rampage on the Syrian coast in March that left at least 1,400 dead, most of them from the Assad family’s sect, the Alawites. It was the type of revenge-infused violence that many Syrians feared when the dictatorship fell, and it fueled worries that the new government wouldn’t be able — or willing — to protect Syria’s minorities.
Image
Rows of body bags lined up on a floor.
In March, emergency workers turned a looted furniture store into a makeshift morgue in the city of Baniyas.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
It did not end there.
Two months later, another outbreak of sectarian violence, just outside Damascus, killed more than 100 people. Most of the dead were Druse, who practice an offshoot of Shia Islam.
Then in mid-July, Sweida exploded.
The conflict began as skirmishes between armed Bedouins, a largely Sunni Muslim group in Sweida, and Druse militias that have effectively controlled Sweida for years. The two groups have long fought over issues like grazing, land and water rights, tensions infused with sectarianism that have occasionally flared into violence.
This time, the clashes began when armed Bedouins attacked and robbed a Druse man along Sweida’s main highway. An exchange of attacks and kidnappings between Bedouin and Druse groups followed.
Soon, the Syrian government deployed its security forces to Sweida — and the bloodshed intensified.
Some Druse fighters attacked government troops, accusing them of siding with the Bedouins. Israel also intervened, launching airstrikes on Syrian government forces to protect the Druse. The Israeli attacks appeared to be part of Israel’s efforts to cultivate allies among the Druse and to prevent Islamists from entrenching themselves in southern Syria.
Sunni fighters from eastern Syria also flocked to Sweida, where they and Bedouin gunmen intermingled with government forces, operating in tandem at times, according to videos verified by The Times.
As the gunfire drew close, Hazza al-Shatter, a 74 year-old Druse man, fled his home in rural Sweida and went to his daughter’s apartment in the city, hoping it would be safer there, three relatives said.
But the next morning, gunmen entered the apartment and forced Mr. al-Shatter, his two sons and his son-in-law onto the street, according to a video verified by The Times.
Video
Armed men punched and kicked members of the Shatter family and forced them into the street.
The fighters can be seen marching the unarmed men in a single file line while gunfire rings out nearby. Mr. al-Shatter’s son-in-law is first, then his two sons, 28 and 43, both teachers in local schools. Mr. al-Shatter follows behind them.
One of the gunmen kicks Mr. al-Shatter in the chest, knocking him against a wall, and slaps his face.
“Mustache, let me see your mustache,” another fighter yells at him, referring to his traditional Druse facial hair. Mr. al-Shatter stumbles forward.
The men are forced to walk until they encounter what appears to be a group of fighters in a mix of tan uniforms, traditional attire and darker clothing. The fighters ready their weapons — and fire on the Druse men. Another video verified by The Times shows their bodies sprawled across the pavement.
Video
0:04
A video posted on Telegram showing the bodies of the Shatter family members. The watermark is from a channel that aggregates news and videos from around Syria.
One of the fighters in the video is seen in yet another video in Sweida, The Times found. That footage shows him cutting off the head of a different man who lies dead in the street.
The Hospital
Chaos soon consumed the city.
At Sweida National Hospital, the bodies of civilians, fighters and government forces filled the morgue and spilled out into the courtyard, according to three medical workers there and videos verified by The Times.
Image
A view from above of morgue workers moving a body bags near a row of remains lined up on the street.
Victims of the clashes outside the Sweida National Hospital in July.Credit...Fahd Kiwan/Associated Press
By the second day of clashes, the hospital was struck by gunfire and shelling. Many of the medical workers, including volunteers who had come to help the wounded, moved from the emergency room to a CT scan room farther from windows and doors.
During a lull in the fighting, Muhammad Bahsas, a 22-year-old engineering student volunteering at the hospital, left the room to see what was happening outside, according to three of his colleagues.
He walked to an entrance and saw government soldiers asking for his help with their injuries, his colleagues said. With gunfire echoing nearby, Mr. Bahsas told them he was afraid to cross the road to help them and went back inside.
It was a fatal decision.
Soon, a group of government soldiers entered the hospital, the building’s security camera footage shows. The soldiers ordered the medical workers sheltering in the CT room to move to an entryway, according to the footage and five medical workers and volunteers present at the time.
“They started to say: ‘Come out, you pigs. Go on your knees. You Druse are pigs,’” said Tariq Surayidinn, a nurse who was there.
One of the soldiers, with “Internal Security Forces” written on the back of his uniform, then singled out Mr. Bahsas, according to the video and witnesses. The soldier shouted that this was the man who refused to treat him earlier, the witnesses said.
A soldier hit Mr. Bahsas on the head. Two others pulled him forward. Mr. Bahsas grabbed one of the soldiers by the neck, but was kicked to the ground. As the soldiers backed away from him, Mr. Bahsas tried to sit up and put his hands in the air.
One of the soldiers raises his rifle and shoots him, the video shows. A few seconds later, another shoots him with a handgun. The Times tracked down and interviewed one of the soldiers at the hospital when the killings took place, and he confirmed that the fighters in the video were government forces.
Video
0:29
Surveillance footage shows government soldiers executing a hospital volunteer. The Times has blacked out some scenes because of their graphic nature.CreditCredit...Sweida National Hospital CCTV
The rest of the medical workers recalled looking on in horror as a soldier dragged Mr. Bahsas’ body across the room, leaving a streak of blood on the floor. Another soldier pulled out his phone and started filming the group of medical workers, their hands in the air, the video shows.
Witnesses who spoke to The Times said that as he filmed, one soldier began asking them if they needed anything and if they had been treated well — presumably in an attempt to cover their tracks and extract statements that the security forces had not mistreated anyone.
“They were asking that, and Muhammad’s body was right there in front of us,” one volunteer, Yazan Abu Hadir, said.
The Executions
Hordes of government and allied fighters roamed the streets of Sweida city, looking for Druse men, armed or not.
Moaz Arnous, a 23-year-old dental student, and his brother Bara, a 20-year-old studying electrical engineering, had been sheltering with their cousin, Ousama Arnous, 26, in his apartment. But by their second night there, the fighting had reached the street outside and Ousama was not sure if they would survive, his relatives said.
“He called and said, ‘Maybe they will kill us; please take care of my mom,” his brother-in-law, Hadi Neman, said.
The next morning, armed men in military fatigues entered the apartment building, identified themselves as government forces and began ransacking it, according to a neighbor. In a video verified by The Times, they can be seen forcing the three Arnous men into a different unit in the building that, unlike the Arnous’ apartment, did not have tall iron bars on the balcony.
The fighters then order the young men onto the balcony, and tell them to jump off.
Moaz steps onto it first and begins to put his leg over the metal railing. But then one of the gunmen yells at him to wait, the video shows.
Video
0:15
A video showing three men from the Arnous family who were forced to jump off a balcony. The Times has shortened the video to exclude the moment the men fall to their deaths.
“Are you guys filming?” the gunman asks one of his fellow fighters. “Are you filming?”
When his comrade confirms that he is filming with his phone, the orders resume.
“Jump off,” the gunman yells. “Come on, jump off!”
Moaz climbs over the railing first and lets go. Ousama is next, knocking down a potted plant as he falls. Then Bara tumbles over the edge, amid a barrage of gunfire.
The fall and gunfire killed all three of them, according to a relative, a neighbor and a doctor at the hospital who examined their bodies.
Deadly home invasions took place elsewhere in Sweida city, too.
Members of the Saraya family were in their apartment building when armed men barged in and demanded to know how many men were inside, according to Dima and Majda Saraya, the wives of two of the men.
“They went up the stairs shouting, ‘Surrender yourselves!’” Dima Saraya recalled. Her uncle told the fighters that they did not have weapons and asked them to guarantee their safety if they surrendered.
After one of the fighters assured them they would be safe, eight men in the apartment — seven in the Saraya family and a neighbor — emerged. The fighters then force the men out of the building, a video verified by The Times shows.
One of the fighters returned to the apartment, identified himself as a member of the government’s security forces, and promised Dima and Majda that their relatives would be back soon, the two women said.
Videos verified by The Times show that was a hollow promise.
In one, the gunmen march the women’s loved ones down a sidewalk in a single-file line.
“Do you want us to guarantee your safety?” one of the fighters says, appearing to mock their earlier request.
The eight men are led to a roundabout in the city, Tishreen Square, and forced to kneel in the dirt, according to another video verified by The Times.
Image
Men with guns standing over a row of men kneeling on the ground,
A still from a video showing the eight men who were executed.
Fighters then open fire on them, the men’s bodies crumpling over as plumes of dust rise in the air.
Yet another video verified by The Times shows two of the gunmen at the square speaking into the camera of a phone.
“There are no men left,” one fighter says.
“Even if there are men, there are no real men left,” he adds.
Then, in English, he says: “Bye-bye.”
The Humiliation
Much of the violence was captured in videos filmed by the fighters themselves as they hunted down unarmed Druse civilians to kill or assault them.
Some filmed themselves with scissors, threatening to go to Sweida to cut off the mustaches of Druse men, according to videos verified by The Times.
One man — who was among the rebels as they made their lightning advance against the Assad government, according to social media posts — can be seen holding a pair of scissors with red handles in the air as he drives down a road.
“Where to?” his friend asks while filming him.
“A barbershop in Al Sweida,” the fighter replies, sarcastically. “Trying to earn some money this morning.”
Video
A video shows a Syrian fighter saying he is going to cut off mustaches from Druse men.
In multiple cases, fighters are seen holding down unarmed Druse men as they cut off their mustaches.
One video verified by The Times shows a group of fighters surrounding a Druse man on a motorcycle. One of the fighters, wearing a uniform from the General Security division of the new government’s Ministry of Interior, holds the Druse man still as another takes a scissor to his mustache.
“Calm down, calm down, you pig!” one of the fighters shouts.
“Best mustache cut yet,” another says.
“Cut more, cut more!” a third yells.
Another video shows a Druse sheikh, Mohsen Hunaidi, lying in his bed at home in Al Majdal village in Sweida. Ninety-three years old and bedridden after a serious fall months earlier, Mr. Hunaidi was unable to flee the village when fighting first broke out, according to his daughter, Samar Hunaidi, 47, and another relative.
Ms. Hunaidi fled as the violence gripped Sweida, she said, but her brother, Adnan Hunaidi, stayed behind to take care of their father. Then, after fighters reached the village, Adnan made the agonizing choice to flee as well and leave their father behind, locking the door to their house in the hopes that the fighters would not get in, Ms. Hunaidi said.
She checked her phone constantly for updates from her brother. Then she received a message from his WhatsApp number, she said: It was a photo of Adnan lying on the ground, his knee bent and hands near his face. The fighters appeared to have killed Adnan, taken his phone and sent her the photo. Adnan’s son received a similar message with the phrase: “He’s a carcass.”
Soon after receiving the message, Ms. Hunaidi saw a video on Facebook of her family’s home in al-Majdal. In the video, her father looks up at a man and tries — in vain — to bat away his hand as he takes a scissor to the old sheikh’s mustache.
“Your pigs have lost you!” the fighter shouts.
The fighters cut off his mustache and then leave him.
It was several days before Druse fighters secured the village and brought Mr. Hunaidi to the hospital in Sweida. By then, he was weak and barely able to talk after spending days without food, water or his daily medications, Ms. Hunaidi said. He died within days.
“At first I was thinking: ‘Tell me how to do it, how to trust them,’” Ms. Hunaidi said, referring to Syria’s new government.
“Now, after all of this,” she said, “it’s impossible for me to trust or reconcile with them.”
Jamie Leventhal contributed video editing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/worl ... e9945df4a0
Ten months after rebels toppled the long-entrenched Assad regime, little-checked bloodshed has led many Syrians to abandon hope that the years of brutality may be over.
When rebels deposed the dictator Bashar al-Assad last year, many Syrians greeted their new rulers with a mix of worry and cautious optimism.
The new government, led by a former jihadist fighter named Ahmed al-Shara, made sweeping promises to protect Syria’s many religious minorities and finally bring peace after more than a decade of civil war.
Mr. al-Shara distanced himself from his jihadist roots, including his past ties to Al Qaeda, and pledged to rein in the extremist fighters in his coalition who consider Syria’s religious minorities — Christians, Druse, Alawites and others — to be heretics.
His assurances helped him win over the United States, Europe and the Gulf nations, which backed his government with sanctions relief and financial support. Even when his forces and armed supporters of his government killed hundreds of civilians from the Assad family’s sect in March, many Syrians considered it a one-off, a brutal but expected outburst of revenge against people seen as close to the former dictatorship.
Then came the killing spree in a province called Sweida.
The bloodshed began over the summer with a feud between warring militias. But as thousands of government troops flooded into the area, ostensibly to quell the fighting, the opposite took place: a bloody rampage against civilians.
About 2,000 combatants and civilians — the vast majority from the Druse religious minority — were killed, an independent war monitor said. It was one of the deadliest outbursts of sectarian violence since Syria’s new authorities took power.
It was also a turning point for the country. To many Syrians, the massacre in Sweida made clear a pattern of government and pro-government forces targeting and killing Syrian minorities, with few repercussions.
Now, the fury over the mass killings is threatening Mr. al-Shara’s control over parts of the country.
The top Druse spiritual leader is calling for Sweida to secede from Syria altogether. Since the massacre, Druse militias have effectively barred government officials and the military from entering much of the province.
The consequences have spilled into other parts of the country, too. After the mass killings in Sweida, Kurdish minority forces in the northeast slowed their negotiations over integrating into the new government. Both regions did not take part in the parliamentary elections that began this month.
To understand what unfolded in Sweida, The New York Times interviewed dozens of witnesses and analyzed hundreds of videos of the mayhem, uncovering execution-style atrocities against civilians carried out by government forces and pro-government fighters.
The Times documented at least five separate episodes of men in military fatigues summarily executing Druse civilians, including groups of unarmed men being marched down the street to their deaths by impromptu firing squads.
Government forces wore a range of uniforms and gunmen in plainclothes sometimes fought by their side, sometimes making it difficult to pin down whether the fighters who committed the atrocities in each case were government security forces or other armed fighters who support Syria’s new leaders.
ImageMen in uniform standing around a battered city neighborhood.
Syrian security forces in Sweida in July.Credit...Karam Al-Masri/Reuters
But The Times verified that government security forces carried out at least one of the executions we documented. In two other executions, witnesses recounted that at least some of the fighters identified themselves as members of government security forces. Beyond that, government soldiers and their armed supporters often operated in tandem, and the evidence showed them committing a range of abuses against Druse civilians.
Many of the fighters filmed themselves as they carried out atrocities, posting an array of trophy videos that spread across social media and struck fear in minorities across Syria.
One of the videos verified by The Times shows fighters in military fatigues ordering three members of a Druse family onto the balcony of an apartment building and forcing them to jump to their deaths.
One of the gunmen then peers over the balcony edge, raises his arm in the air and yells, “God is great!”
In another video verified by The Times, men in fatigues point their rifles at an unarmed 60 year-old Druse man, Munir al-Rajma, as he sits on the steps of a school, demanding to know if he is Druse. Mr. al-Rajma replies that he is Syrian.
“What do you mean by Syrian? Are you Muslim or Druse?” one of the fighters yells.
“Yes, brother, I am Druse,” he responds.
The men in fatigues then open fire, killing him. “This is the fate of every dog like you, you pigs,” one of them is heard saying.
Video
Fighters filmed themselves killing Munir al-Rajma, a Druse man. The Times has shortened the video to remove the moment he was executed.
Nearly all of the civilians killed in the violence were Druse, independent monitors have concluded. But Druse men also took up arms, carrying out killings and committing some atrocities as well.
Druse fighters killed at least three civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group. In one case, they paraded what they described as the bodies of government soldiers through the streets.
Of the roughly 2,000 people killed in all, nearly 1,000 were Druse civilians and at least five were Bedouin civilians, according to the Observatory.
The Syrian government has condemned the violence and pledged to investigate reports of “shocking and serious violations committed by an unknown group wearing military uniforms in Sweida.”
Mr. al-Shara also vowed to hold the perpetrators accountable, pledging to “bring every hand stained with the blood of innocents to justice,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in September. Government officials formed a fact-finding committee in July to investigate the atrocities, and they have offered their support to U.N. investigators carrying out their own inquiry. The Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment on the findings of The Times’s investigation.
The government’s assurances have not tempered fears among the Druse, or their calls for secession.
“The right to self-determination is a sacred right,” the spiritual leader, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, announced last month. “We will not retreat from it — no matter the sacrifices.”
The Tension
For decades, sectarian tension has simmered — and erupted — with disastrous consequences for Syria.
The country is a patchwork of ethnicities and religions, with a majority Sunni Muslim population living among Shiite Muslims, Christians, Druse and the Assad family’s sect, Alawites, which held enormous sway under dictatorial rule.
During the Assads’ more than 50-year reign, their government fanned sectarian fears to retain power, claiming that the Sunni majority reviled all Syrian minorities. The government, with many Alawites dominating its upper echelons, portrayed itself as the sole protector of Syria’s minorities.
The civil war hardened those divides, with some of the largely Sunni Muslim rebels embracing a jihadist line. Then, when Mr. al-Shara deposed the Assad regime late last year, a Sunni-led government was in power for the first time in decades — and many Syrian minorities felt extremely vulnerable.
Mr. al-Shara tried to ease their concerns, proclaiming a new Syria, safe for everyone. Yet his government struggled to merge his disparate assortment of rebels into a disciplined national army. A new Sunni Muslim nationalism began to emerge, emboldening Sunni extremists across the country.
In a few short months, the dam burst.
Government forces took part in a rampage on the Syrian coast in March that left at least 1,400 dead, most of them from the Assad family’s sect, the Alawites. It was the type of revenge-infused violence that many Syrians feared when the dictatorship fell, and it fueled worries that the new government wouldn’t be able — or willing — to protect Syria’s minorities.
Image
Rows of body bags lined up on a floor.
In March, emergency workers turned a looted furniture store into a makeshift morgue in the city of Baniyas.Credit...David Guttenfelder/The New York Times
It did not end there.
Two months later, another outbreak of sectarian violence, just outside Damascus, killed more than 100 people. Most of the dead were Druse, who practice an offshoot of Shia Islam.
Then in mid-July, Sweida exploded.
The conflict began as skirmishes between armed Bedouins, a largely Sunni Muslim group in Sweida, and Druse militias that have effectively controlled Sweida for years. The two groups have long fought over issues like grazing, land and water rights, tensions infused with sectarianism that have occasionally flared into violence.
This time, the clashes began when armed Bedouins attacked and robbed a Druse man along Sweida’s main highway. An exchange of attacks and kidnappings between Bedouin and Druse groups followed.
Soon, the Syrian government deployed its security forces to Sweida — and the bloodshed intensified.
Some Druse fighters attacked government troops, accusing them of siding with the Bedouins. Israel also intervened, launching airstrikes on Syrian government forces to protect the Druse. The Israeli attacks appeared to be part of Israel’s efforts to cultivate allies among the Druse and to prevent Islamists from entrenching themselves in southern Syria.
Sunni fighters from eastern Syria also flocked to Sweida, where they and Bedouin gunmen intermingled with government forces, operating in tandem at times, according to videos verified by The Times.
As the gunfire drew close, Hazza al-Shatter, a 74 year-old Druse man, fled his home in rural Sweida and went to his daughter’s apartment in the city, hoping it would be safer there, three relatives said.
But the next morning, gunmen entered the apartment and forced Mr. al-Shatter, his two sons and his son-in-law onto the street, according to a video verified by The Times.
Video
Armed men punched and kicked members of the Shatter family and forced them into the street.
The fighters can be seen marching the unarmed men in a single file line while gunfire rings out nearby. Mr. al-Shatter’s son-in-law is first, then his two sons, 28 and 43, both teachers in local schools. Mr. al-Shatter follows behind them.
One of the gunmen kicks Mr. al-Shatter in the chest, knocking him against a wall, and slaps his face.
“Mustache, let me see your mustache,” another fighter yells at him, referring to his traditional Druse facial hair. Mr. al-Shatter stumbles forward.
The men are forced to walk until they encounter what appears to be a group of fighters in a mix of tan uniforms, traditional attire and darker clothing. The fighters ready their weapons — and fire on the Druse men. Another video verified by The Times shows their bodies sprawled across the pavement.
Video
0:04
A video posted on Telegram showing the bodies of the Shatter family members. The watermark is from a channel that aggregates news and videos from around Syria.
One of the fighters in the video is seen in yet another video in Sweida, The Times found. That footage shows him cutting off the head of a different man who lies dead in the street.
The Hospital
Chaos soon consumed the city.
At Sweida National Hospital, the bodies of civilians, fighters and government forces filled the morgue and spilled out into the courtyard, according to three medical workers there and videos verified by The Times.
Image
A view from above of morgue workers moving a body bags near a row of remains lined up on the street.
Victims of the clashes outside the Sweida National Hospital in July.Credit...Fahd Kiwan/Associated Press
By the second day of clashes, the hospital was struck by gunfire and shelling. Many of the medical workers, including volunteers who had come to help the wounded, moved from the emergency room to a CT scan room farther from windows and doors.
During a lull in the fighting, Muhammad Bahsas, a 22-year-old engineering student volunteering at the hospital, left the room to see what was happening outside, according to three of his colleagues.
He walked to an entrance and saw government soldiers asking for his help with their injuries, his colleagues said. With gunfire echoing nearby, Mr. Bahsas told them he was afraid to cross the road to help them and went back inside.
It was a fatal decision.
Soon, a group of government soldiers entered the hospital, the building’s security camera footage shows. The soldiers ordered the medical workers sheltering in the CT room to move to an entryway, according to the footage and five medical workers and volunteers present at the time.
“They started to say: ‘Come out, you pigs. Go on your knees. You Druse are pigs,’” said Tariq Surayidinn, a nurse who was there.
One of the soldiers, with “Internal Security Forces” written on the back of his uniform, then singled out Mr. Bahsas, according to the video and witnesses. The soldier shouted that this was the man who refused to treat him earlier, the witnesses said.
A soldier hit Mr. Bahsas on the head. Two others pulled him forward. Mr. Bahsas grabbed one of the soldiers by the neck, but was kicked to the ground. As the soldiers backed away from him, Mr. Bahsas tried to sit up and put his hands in the air.
One of the soldiers raises his rifle and shoots him, the video shows. A few seconds later, another shoots him with a handgun. The Times tracked down and interviewed one of the soldiers at the hospital when the killings took place, and he confirmed that the fighters in the video were government forces.
Video
0:29
Surveillance footage shows government soldiers executing a hospital volunteer. The Times has blacked out some scenes because of their graphic nature.CreditCredit...Sweida National Hospital CCTV
The rest of the medical workers recalled looking on in horror as a soldier dragged Mr. Bahsas’ body across the room, leaving a streak of blood on the floor. Another soldier pulled out his phone and started filming the group of medical workers, their hands in the air, the video shows.
Witnesses who spoke to The Times said that as he filmed, one soldier began asking them if they needed anything and if they had been treated well — presumably in an attempt to cover their tracks and extract statements that the security forces had not mistreated anyone.
“They were asking that, and Muhammad’s body was right there in front of us,” one volunteer, Yazan Abu Hadir, said.
The Executions
Hordes of government and allied fighters roamed the streets of Sweida city, looking for Druse men, armed or not.
Moaz Arnous, a 23-year-old dental student, and his brother Bara, a 20-year-old studying electrical engineering, had been sheltering with their cousin, Ousama Arnous, 26, in his apartment. But by their second night there, the fighting had reached the street outside and Ousama was not sure if they would survive, his relatives said.
“He called and said, ‘Maybe they will kill us; please take care of my mom,” his brother-in-law, Hadi Neman, said.
The next morning, armed men in military fatigues entered the apartment building, identified themselves as government forces and began ransacking it, according to a neighbor. In a video verified by The Times, they can be seen forcing the three Arnous men into a different unit in the building that, unlike the Arnous’ apartment, did not have tall iron bars on the balcony.
The fighters then order the young men onto the balcony, and tell them to jump off.
Moaz steps onto it first and begins to put his leg over the metal railing. But then one of the gunmen yells at him to wait, the video shows.
Video
0:15
A video showing three men from the Arnous family who were forced to jump off a balcony. The Times has shortened the video to exclude the moment the men fall to their deaths.
“Are you guys filming?” the gunman asks one of his fellow fighters. “Are you filming?”
When his comrade confirms that he is filming with his phone, the orders resume.
“Jump off,” the gunman yells. “Come on, jump off!”
Moaz climbs over the railing first and lets go. Ousama is next, knocking down a potted plant as he falls. Then Bara tumbles over the edge, amid a barrage of gunfire.
The fall and gunfire killed all three of them, according to a relative, a neighbor and a doctor at the hospital who examined their bodies.
Deadly home invasions took place elsewhere in Sweida city, too.
Members of the Saraya family were in their apartment building when armed men barged in and demanded to know how many men were inside, according to Dima and Majda Saraya, the wives of two of the men.
“They went up the stairs shouting, ‘Surrender yourselves!’” Dima Saraya recalled. Her uncle told the fighters that they did not have weapons and asked them to guarantee their safety if they surrendered.
After one of the fighters assured them they would be safe, eight men in the apartment — seven in the Saraya family and a neighbor — emerged. The fighters then force the men out of the building, a video verified by The Times shows.
One of the fighters returned to the apartment, identified himself as a member of the government’s security forces, and promised Dima and Majda that their relatives would be back soon, the two women said.
Videos verified by The Times show that was a hollow promise.
In one, the gunmen march the women’s loved ones down a sidewalk in a single-file line.
“Do you want us to guarantee your safety?” one of the fighters says, appearing to mock their earlier request.
The eight men are led to a roundabout in the city, Tishreen Square, and forced to kneel in the dirt, according to another video verified by The Times.
Image
Men with guns standing over a row of men kneeling on the ground,
A still from a video showing the eight men who were executed.
Fighters then open fire on them, the men’s bodies crumpling over as plumes of dust rise in the air.
Yet another video verified by The Times shows two of the gunmen at the square speaking into the camera of a phone.
“There are no men left,” one fighter says.
“Even if there are men, there are no real men left,” he adds.
Then, in English, he says: “Bye-bye.”
The Humiliation
Much of the violence was captured in videos filmed by the fighters themselves as they hunted down unarmed Druse civilians to kill or assault them.
Some filmed themselves with scissors, threatening to go to Sweida to cut off the mustaches of Druse men, according to videos verified by The Times.
One man — who was among the rebels as they made their lightning advance against the Assad government, according to social media posts — can be seen holding a pair of scissors with red handles in the air as he drives down a road.
“Where to?” his friend asks while filming him.
“A barbershop in Al Sweida,” the fighter replies, sarcastically. “Trying to earn some money this morning.”
Video
A video shows a Syrian fighter saying he is going to cut off mustaches from Druse men.
In multiple cases, fighters are seen holding down unarmed Druse men as they cut off their mustaches.
One video verified by The Times shows a group of fighters surrounding a Druse man on a motorcycle. One of the fighters, wearing a uniform from the General Security division of the new government’s Ministry of Interior, holds the Druse man still as another takes a scissor to his mustache.
“Calm down, calm down, you pig!” one of the fighters shouts.
“Best mustache cut yet,” another says.
“Cut more, cut more!” a third yells.
Another video shows a Druse sheikh, Mohsen Hunaidi, lying in his bed at home in Al Majdal village in Sweida. Ninety-three years old and bedridden after a serious fall months earlier, Mr. Hunaidi was unable to flee the village when fighting first broke out, according to his daughter, Samar Hunaidi, 47, and another relative.
Ms. Hunaidi fled as the violence gripped Sweida, she said, but her brother, Adnan Hunaidi, stayed behind to take care of their father. Then, after fighters reached the village, Adnan made the agonizing choice to flee as well and leave their father behind, locking the door to their house in the hopes that the fighters would not get in, Ms. Hunaidi said.
She checked her phone constantly for updates from her brother. Then she received a message from his WhatsApp number, she said: It was a photo of Adnan lying on the ground, his knee bent and hands near his face. The fighters appeared to have killed Adnan, taken his phone and sent her the photo. Adnan’s son received a similar message with the phrase: “He’s a carcass.”
Soon after receiving the message, Ms. Hunaidi saw a video on Facebook of her family’s home in al-Majdal. In the video, her father looks up at a man and tries — in vain — to bat away his hand as he takes a scissor to the old sheikh’s mustache.
“Your pigs have lost you!” the fighter shouts.
The fighters cut off his mustache and then leave him.
It was several days before Druse fighters secured the village and brought Mr. Hunaidi to the hospital in Sweida. By then, he was weak and barely able to talk after spending days without food, water or his daily medications, Ms. Hunaidi said. He died within days.
“At first I was thinking: ‘Tell me how to do it, how to trust them,’” Ms. Hunaidi said, referring to Syria’s new government.
“Now, after all of this,” she said, “it’s impossible for me to trust or reconcile with them.”
Jamie Leventhal contributed video editing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/worl ... e9945df4a0