(MENAFN- Arab Times) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged Tuesday to track down Druze in the occupied Golan Heights who fatally assaulted a wounded Syrian on his way to hospital in Israel. "This is very severe," Netanyahu said of the incident. "We will find those who carried out the lynching and bring them to justice." Monday's attack, roundly condemned by local Druze leaders, came as the community feared for the fate of its brethren in Syria after rebels there attacked them.
Two Syrian men were being taken to hospital by Israeli military ambulance late Monday when dozens of Druze in the town of Majdal Shams stoned the vehicle, forcing it to stop, dragged the men out and beat them. "As a consequence of the attack one of the passengers died and another was critically injured," a police statement said. An Israeli soldier and an officer in the ambulance were also assaulted. Police did not identify the Syrians or say what their medical condition had been before the attack.
Policy
Israel has a policy of giving medical assistance to wounded Syrians who reach Israeli lines. Syrian Druze are traditional allies of President Bashar al-Assad, and the rioters on Monday probably believed the men in the ambulance were rebels fighting to unseat him.
The Druze are a secretive offshoot of Shiite Islam. Officials say there are 110,000 of them in northern Israel and another 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan. While the Druze of Israel are citizens and subject to the same military draft as Jews, the vast majority of those on the Golan have refused to take Israeli nationality.
The spiritual leader of the Israeli Druze, Sheikh Muafak Tarif, told AFP that an emergency meeting of religious and secular Druze leaders "strongly condemned" the ambulance attack, calling it "a deplorable act committed by outlaws". "The Druze religion, values and tradition prohibit inflicting any harm on wounded people," he added, and said leaders condemning the attack included Golan Druze. But there was a different, more angry, tone in Majdal Shams on Tuesday. "The Druze of Syria, this is our family," Tarek Awdt, 27 told AFP in the town square.
On June 10 at least 20 Syrian Druze were killed in an unprecedented shoot-out with Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front in northwestern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. "What happened yesterday was not an attack against Israel, but against Al- Nusra," Awdt said. "We will fight to prevent that happening here." The Syrians attacked on Monday "got what they deserved," said Souad Fahad al- Din, 33, a saleswoman in Majdal Shams. "It should have been expected," she said. "Israel has no right to treat them and then send them back there to carry on killing." In other news, in Syria's civil war, both government forces and opposition fighters are targeting civilians in a way that has led to "unspeakable suffering," UN investigators said Tuesday. The assessment, in a report by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, sought to draw attention to the plight of the civilians, saying that with "each passing day there are fewer safe places in Syria." Government forces have consistently failed to employ precision weapons "when attacking targets in dense urban areas, causing mass civilian casualties," the report said.
It said the government's use of barrel bombs in aerial attacks against whole areas rather than specific targets, "is in violation of international humanitarian law and, as previously documented, amounts to the war crime of targeting civilians." But it also said that anti-government armed groups continue to shell "civilianinhabited areas under government control indiscriminately," stressing that indiscriminate attacks on civilian-inhabited areas are committed across Syria "by most, if not all, of the warring parties." "In no instance have the parties to the conflict shown any commitment to the paramount obligation under international law to distinguish between civilian and military objectives," said Brazilian diplomat Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, who chairs the panel. Syria's conflict, which began in March 2011, has killed more than 220,000 people, according to UN figures. Separately, a report by a London-based research center, which was also released on Tuesday, painted a grim picture of the Syrian economy, saying it has shrunk by a whopping 50 percent over the past four years. Chatham House also said that the Syrian currency has depreciated by about 80 percent and that inflation averaged 51 percent in the first quarter of 2015.
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