Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa's government responded by deploying forces to the city. Druze residents of Suweida told the BBC they had witnessed "barbaric acts" as gunmen - government forces and foreign fighters - attacked people. Israel targeted these forces, saying they were acting to protect the Druze.

In this whirl of shrapnel and shellfire, hopes for a new era of peace in a nation long torn apart by dictatorship and a 14-year civil war are quickly fading. Instead, Syria appears on the brink of being dragged into yet another civil and international conflict.

Trapped in her home in As-Suwayda, Syrian pharmacist Hala Saraya recounts the brutal killings of her family and pleads for the world to hear the Druze community's cry for help.

Oklahoma man and Druze community member Hosam Saraya was executed alongside his family in Syria. State lawmakers are sharing their reactions.

Dr Talat Amer, a surgeon at Sweida National Hospital in southern Syria, worked tirelessly for three days as bombs fell and the building came under siege from government and militia forces.

Syria's Islamist-led government struggled to implement a ceasefire in the predominantly Druze region of Sweida on Saturday, with machinegun fire and mortar shelling ringing out after days of bloodshed.

The Druze religious sect, enmeshed in an outbreak of tit-for-tat violence in Syria, began roughly 1,000 years ago as an offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam.

As violence broke out last week between two ethnic groups in southern Syria, both the Israeli and Syrian governments intervened.

After days of bloodshed in Syria's Druze city of Sweida, survivors emerged to collect and bury the scores of dead found across the city.