Damascus says it met Israel in Jordan; a Druze leader says his community belongs to Israel

The kinetic record is the firmer one. On the evening of 17–18 August, Israel struck the Abu al-Duhur military airport in northern Syria. Syrian state television Ekhbariya, citing an unnamed military source, reported eight air strikes on the runway and storage facilities; Axios’s Barak Ravid, reporting independently, put at least eight bombs on runways and several hangars at a base roughly 45 miles from the Turkish border, damaging runways that had recently been rebuilt. Turkey rejected Israeli allegations that it posed a threat by preparing to send troops there, per Al Jazeera; Syria condemned the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty. Al Jazeera reported that the US envoy to Damascus suggested the strike may have been aimed at provoking Turkey — the outlet’s headline puts the word in quotation marks and we have not verified the speaker’s exact phrasing. Axios framed the episode as putting Netanyahu at odds with Trump. On 22 August an Israeli drone hit a truck in Beit Jinn in the south-west, wounding several people; the imagery Al Jazeera carried was user-generated.

The diplomatic record rests on thinner ground. SANA reported that Syria and Israel held high-level, US-mediated talks in Jordan on Sunday 23 August, citing a diplomatic source at the foreign ministry; Reuters carried that attribution explicitly, and the subsequent Al Jazeera, New Arab and US News versions run off the same wire. No Israeli or US on-the-record confirmation appeared in our sweep. SANA’s characterisation of the agenda, as carried by Al Jazeera, was that discussions “focused on establishing practical mechanisms to halt Israeli attacks, arrests and targeting operations” and on “reviving negotiations for a lasting security agreement”. On 24 August, again via Syrian state media, Damascus said it would not accept limits on developing its military capabilities or forming alliances. The one clean on-the-record Syrian line came from Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani, interviewed by Reuters in Damascus on 22 August, who expects talks to resume and urged Israel to seize a “historic opportunity”.

Then the southern file moved. On 25 August, Hikmat al-Hijri, a spiritual leader of Syria’s Druze community, described the Druze as an “inseparable part of the State of Israel” and said there was common ground with Israel “even in faith”. The remarks were reported by The Media Line and published via the Jerusalem Post on 26 August, datelined Damascus — a single outlet, and the piece says the comments “sparked widespread controversy”. We found no response from Damascus, from Druze religious institutions, or from the Israeli government. Al-Hijri told Yedioth Ahronoth in January that Syria was heading toward fragmentation and semi-autonomous regions, per a New Arab analysis, which also puts the July 2025 Sweida violence at more than 1,600 killed — a count whose origin we could not trace and which should be treated as contested.

Assessment: Note the asymmetry in evidence. The bombs are corroborated by two independent accounts; the peace process exists so far only in the words of one government’s news agency quoting an official it will not name. That is a pattern worth watching rather than dismissing: Damascus has an incentive to advertise a channel to Washington and Jerusalem whether or not the channel is producing anything, and Israeli silence costs Israel nothing. Al-Hijri’s declaration is the cheaper and more dangerous variable. It hands Israel a political claim in the south precisely as Damascus banks its northeastern win, and the silence around it — no rebuttal from Sweida’s own institutions — is the thing to chase, not the quote itself.