bombards

Israel has carried out powerful air strikes near Syria’s presidential palace and on the military headquarters in the heart of Damascus, a major escalation in its bombardment of the neighbouring country.

At least three people were killed and 34 others were wounded in the attacks on Damascus on Wednesday, Syrian state media reported, citing the Ministry of Health.

While targeting Damascus, the Israeli military continued to pound areas in southern Syria, including Suwayda, where a new ceasefire deal has been struck after four days of clashes between Druze armed groups, Bedouin tribes and government forces, which left hundreds dead.

Syria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the Israeli attacks on Damascus and Suwayda were “part of a systematic Israeli policy to ignite tension and chaos and undermine security in Syria”, calling on the international community to take “urgent action” against Israeli aggression.

Israel said its bombing campaign is aimed at protecting the Druze minority, and it has called on the Syrian government to withdraw its troops from the city of Suwayda, where much of the violence has taken place.

Defence Minister Israel Katz said on X that the Israeli military would “continue to operate vigorously in Suwayda to destroy the forces that attacked the Druze until they withdraw completely”.

Later on Wednesday, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the parties to the fighting in southern Syria had agreed on “specific steps that will bring this troubling and horrifying situation to an end tonight”.

“This will require all parties to deliver on the commitments they have made and this is what we fully expect them to do,” Rubio said on X of the ceasefire deal, reached one day after an earlier iteration had collapsed.

More than 300 people had been killed in fighting as of Wednesday morning, including four children, eight women and 165 soldiers and security forces, according to the UK-based war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Army withdrawal from Suwayda

The Syrian Ministry of Interior and Druze leader Sheikh Yousef Jarbou confirmed on Wednesday that they had reached a ceasefire. But the new deal was rejected by Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajari, another Druze leader, who promised to continue fighting until Suwayda was “entirely liberated”.

According to the ministry, the deal declares a “total and immediate halt to all military operations”, as well as the formation of a committee comprising government officials and Druze spiritual leaders to supervise its implementation.

That evening, the Syrian Ministry of Defence said it had begun withdrawing the army from Suwayda “in implementation of the terms of the adopted agreement after the end of the sweep of the city for outlaw groups”.

Speaking shortly before Rubio’s announcement of a deal, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce had said that the US wanted Syrian government forces to “withdraw their military in order to enable all sides to de-escalate and find a path forward”.

But while Syrian troops are withdrawing, the government will be maintaining a presence in the city,

Reporting from Syria’s capital Damascus, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said the deal included the “deployment of government forces”.

“They will set up checkpoints, and this area will be fully integrated into the Syrian state,” she said.

A complete withdrawal by the government would, she said, “mean a failure in efforts by the new authorities to unite a fractured nation and extend its authority across Syria”.

“But staying could open a much bigger conflict with Israel that has promised more strikes if, in the words of Katz, the message wasn’t received.”

Pretext to bomb

The escalation in Syria began with tit-for-tat kidnappings and attacks between Druze armed factions and local Sunni Bedouin tribes in the southern province of Suwayda.

Government forces that intervened to restore order clashed with the Druze, with reports of the former carrying out human rights abuses, according to local monitors and analysts.

The actions committed by members of the security forces – acknowledged as “unlawful criminal acts” by the Syrian presidency – have given Israel a pretext to bombard Syria as it builds military bases in the demilitarised buffer zone with Syria seized by its forces.

Haid Haid, consulting fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House, told Al Jazeera that Israel had been clear since the ouster of Bashar al-Assad last year that they did not want Syrian forces “to be deployed to the deconfliction line in southern Syria”.

“One way Israel is trying to advance that plan is to present itself as the ‘protectors’ of the Druze community,” Haid said.

Ammar Kahf, the Damascus-based executive director of the Omran Center for Strategic Studies, said: “It’s a clear message to the Syrian government that the Israelis are not going to be silent.

“The Israelis are not going to allow the Syrian government to spread its authority all over the territory.”

June 25 (UPI) — At least 20 people were killed and up to 300 injured in a massive Russian airborne assault on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro in the country’s industrial heartland, authorities said Wednesday.

Dnipropetrovsk Gov. Serhii Lysak said in a social media update that the strikes during the daytime on Tuesday killed 18 people in Dnipro and two in a separate attack on Samar, 10 miles away to the northeast, with nearly 300 people injured across the province.

“The entire Dnipropetrovsk region is in mourning. This is a pain that resonates in every heart. That never goes away,” Lysak wrote.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in The Hague meeting with European heads of government at an annual gathering of NATO, said many of the injured were passengers on a train.

“This strike hit numerous civilian infrastructure: homes, schools, and even a regular passenger train. There were more than 500 passengers on board. Five train cars were destroyed. There were no fatalities. All the injured have received medical assistance. It was another Russian strike on life,” he said in a post on X.

State-run Ukrainian Railways confirmed a missile struck near one of its trains en route from Odessa to Zaporizhzhia as it was passing through Dnipro and that dozens of passengers had been injured by flying glass.

The company said emergency workers moved passengers who were unhurt to the nearest subway station, from where they were able to make their way into Dnipro to catch a replacement train service to continue their journey to Zaporizhzhia, if they so wished.

Dnipropetrovsk is Zelensky’s home province.

The attacks mirrored a deadly wave of airstrikes on Kyiv last week that coincided with a meeting of the G7 group of countries in Canada. The group was formally the G8 — until Russia was ejected in 2014 over its invasion and annexation of Crimea.

Elsewhere, one person was killed and 10 injured in Kharkiv city and Kupiansk and surrounding areas after residences and other civilian infrastructure were targeted by Russian attack drones and warplanes launching air-to-surface rockets and glide bombs.

In the neighboring part-Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia province, which lies to the south of Dnipro, five people were injured after Russian forces carried out missile, drone and airstrikes on more than a dozen towns and opened fire with artillery.

Three people were killed near the frontline in Donetsk, according to Gov. Vadym Filashkin, less than 100 miles east of Dnipro, where Ukrainian forces are battling to hold off a Russian advance poised to break through to the west into Ukraine‘s industrial heartland.

Earlier this month, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Russian troops and units of its 90th Guards Tank Division had penetrated into Dnipropetrovsk without resistance and were pushing forward.

Ukraine rejected the claim outright as fake news, but Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst at the Finland-based Black Bird Group, told the Kyiv Independent that geolocation data indicated an incursion by Russian troops had occurred.

Kastehelmi said that while he thought Russian forces would push on “at least somewhat” further west over the summer, he didn’t expect it to have much impact on the net state of play across the frontline.

Other military experts agreed.

They said the southeastern region of Ukraine would ultimately be penetrated by Russian forces, but only to a degree, as Moscow’s overarching goal was to capture the remaining areas of Donetsk it does not already control, and therefore neither side was likely to divert significant forces to the theater.