Syria's transitional president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has promised to protect the country's many religious and ethnic minorities since his Sunni Islamist group led the rebel offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad's regime in December after 13 years of devastating civil war. However, the mass killings of hundreds of civilians from Assad's Alawite sect in the western coastal region last month, during clashes between the new security forces and Assad loyalists, heightened fears among minority communities and sparked calls for international protection. Israel's military struck the outskirts of Damascus on Wednesday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz said that a "serious message" had been conveyed to the Syrian government that they expected it "to act to prevent harm to the Druze". Syria's foreign ministry said it rejected all forms of "foreign intervention" in its affairs, without explicitly mentioning Israel. UN special envoy Geir Pedersen said he was "deeply concerned" by violence and "the potential for further escalation of an extremely fragile situation". In February, Netanyahu warned that he would not "tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria" from the country's new security forces. He also demanded the complete demilitarisation of much of the south, saying Israel saw Sharaa's Sunni Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), as a threat. HTS is a former al-Qaeda affiliate that is still designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN, the US, the EU and the UK. The Israeli military has already carried out hundreds of strikes across Syria to destroy the country's military assets over the past four months. It has also sent troops into the UN-monitored demilitarised buffer zone in the Golan Heights, several adjoining areas and the summit of Mount Hermon.