JERUSALEM // Israeli police said on Wednesday they had carried out a “wave of arrests” of suspects involved in two attacks by Druze on military vehicles transporting wounded Syrians to hospital.
Israeli media said nine Druze were arrested over Monday’s attacks, when a mob killed a Syrian and wounded another in the Golan Heights and an ambulance was stoned in the Galilee town of Hurfesh.
The attacks in northern Israel and the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights drew strong censure from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government is trying to prevent a spillover of sectarianism from Syria while offering limited humanitarian aid.
“An extensive wave of arrests was conducted overnight of suspects involved in two incidents of attacking military ambulances near Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights and near Hurfesh,” the police said.
Further details of the investigations into both incidents remained under a gag order.
Inflamed by media reports suggesting some of the hundreds of wounded Syrians who have been admitted to Israel for medical care belong to rebel groups fighting the Druze in Syria, the crowds of Druze blocked two army ambulances for inspection on Monday.
One ambulance managed to escape with crew and patients unharmed. In the other, a Syrian casualty was killed and another seriously wounded in what Israeli officials described as a lynching. Two troops accompanying them were also injured.
Syria’s Druze minority 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.
On June 10 at least 20 Syrian Druze were reportedly killed in an unprecedented shootout with Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al Nusra in northwestern Syria.
Syria has said the two men attacked in the ambulance were members of Al Nusra. Israel said they were civilians.
Druze leaders have pressed Israel to take a more active role in the Syrian war, but Israeli defence minister Moshe Yaalon reiterated that no internal pressures or acts of violence would “drag us into a war that is not ours”.
“We will continue to provide humanitarian aid to women, children and wounded people who reach the field hospital we set up along the border in the wake of the difficult situation,” he said from Tel Aviv.
Israel does not rule out the possibility that some of those given medical care are rebels.
Mr Netanyahu has described the Golan Heights killing as a “lynching” and was set to meet on Wednesday with local Druze leaders, who condemned the attack.
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.
Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres of the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War.
* Agence France-Presse and Reuters
