# Netanyahu Says One Phone Call With Syria's Leader Stopped a Massacre

> Speaking at a Likud conference for the Druze community, Netanyahu revealed for the first time that he spoke directly with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa after last year's Israeli strikes on Damascus, and says that call halted sectarian killing in Sweida.

- Source: Israel Today
- Canonical URL: https://israeltoday.news/article/netanyahu-sharaa-call-damascus-strike-druze
- Author: Amir Doron
- Section: World
- Published: 2026-10-15T19:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-15T19:00:00.000Z
- Tags: Syria, Druze, Netanyahu

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Prime Minister Netanyahu said for the first time that he spoke directly with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in the aftermath of Israel's July 2025 strikes on Damascus, the first disclosed conversation between an Israeli and a Syrian head of state. He made the disclosure on 15 October at a Likud party conference for the Druze community in Yarka, a setting chosen for an audience with direct family and religious ties to the Druze of southern Syria.

The July strikes hit Syria's Defense Ministry and an area near the presidential palace, which Israel said was meant to protect Syria's Druze population during sectarian violence in Sweida province that killed more than 2,000 people, including 789 Druze civilians. Netanyahu described the call that followed as very short and very sharp, and said the slaughter stopped afterward, though he gave no detail of what was actually said on the line.

Netanyahu and Sharaa lead countries that have fought each other in four wars and still have no diplomatic relations, which is what makes a direct call between them notable regardless of its content. It also fits a pattern that has been building more quietly since September 2025, when Jerusalem and Damascus began holding security talks, the first indication that a year after Sharaa took power in Damascus, channels exist between the two governments even without any public agreement to use them.

Israel is home to roughly 150,000 Druze citizens with family and communal ties across the border, which is why a Likud conference built around that community was the setting Netanyahu chose to reveal the call rather than a security briefing or a foreign policy address. The disclosure tells Druze voters that a strike many of them welcomed led somewhere beyond a single military operation, even if what exactly it led to remains, for now, a claim made once from a podium rather than a relationship either government has described in public.

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Originally published by Israel Today. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://israeltoday.news/article/netanyahu-sharaa-call-damascus-strike-druze.