Netanyahu says he called Syria's leader to stop the Suwayda killings

Benjamin Netanyahu said he picked up the phone to Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa after Israeli strikes in Damascus during the violence that swept Suwayda in July 2025. Speaking on Thursday in Yarka, a Druze village in northern Israel, and later at a Likud conference for the Druze community, the Israeli prime minister said: “I picked up the phone to Sharaa. It was a very short and very sharp conversation. And the slaughter stopped.”

Netanyahu said the call came shortly after Israel bombed the Syrian Defence Ministry in Damascus. He said Israel had also struck “a target inside the palace compound”.

He described the exchange as “a very brief and to-the-point conversation, and the massacre stopped.”

The comments are the first publicly disclosed contact between the leaders of Israel and Syria, neighbours with no formal relations that have fought several wars. Syrian sources confirmed to Haaretz that Netanyahu spoke with Sharaa last year, though they said other participants were involved and that it was not a direct exchange between the two men.

The call concerned violence in Suwayda, where fighting began in July 2025 between Druze and Bedouin groups in the city and surrounding villages. Government forces sided with the Bedouin fighters.

More than 1,700 people were killed. The UN said in a March report that Druze civilians were especially targeted, while also recording violations by both sides.

Sharaa took power in late 2024 after the ouster of the longtime Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad. Since Assad’s government fell in December 2024, Israel and Syria have held direct and indirect talks on a possible security agreement, while Sharaa’s government began US-mediated talks with Israel in 2025.

A US-Jordanian-Syrian roadmap agreement for Suwayda was reached in September 2025, with the aim of restoring security in the area.

Syria’s government said the Druze were an “integral part” of the country. It said Damascus rejected “its politicization or its forcible insertion into Israeli propaganda and elections.” The statement did not address Netanyahu’s account of the conversation with Sharaa.

Also on Thursday, Damascus accused Israeli forces of setting fire to a warehouse in the Daraa countryside.