A shaky ceasefire in southern Syria between warring Islamic factions appears to be holding after deadly violence erupted last week in the district of Suwayda, which provoked Israel to launch a series of strikes to protect the Druze minority in the region. Experts remain wary of the ability of the new Syrian government, with its roots in Islamist extremism, to maintain stability in the country.

On Sunday, reports indicated that an agreement orchestrated by the Syrian government for the Druze and Bedouin tribes to cease hostilities was reached, with no reported violence occurring as of Sunday. The violence began a week ago after a Druze merchant was reportedly abducted on the road to Damascus. As a result, Druze and Bedouin fighters began an armed conflict that was joined by Syrian government forces, with both sides claiming atrocities have been committed against them. The U.K.-based monitoring organization Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported that over 1,120 people have been killed, including 427 Druze fighters and 298 Druze civilians as well as 354 government security personnel and 21 Sunni Bedouin.

The bloody conflict drew the attention of Israel, which launched strikes last week on 160 targets in the region on behalf of the Druze, a 150,000-person minority group within the Jewish state. According to Dr. A.J. Nolte, director of the Institute for Israel Studies at Regent University, the reason behind Israel’s intervention is rooted in a number of factors.

“There are a couple of dynamics, and some of them are emotional in terms of actually domestic politics and policy, and some of them are strategic,” he explained during “Washington Watch” Friday. “… The Druze populations in Galilee have been citizens of Israel for a long time. They are active in the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. … There are also Druze communities in the Golan Heights, which, of course, Israel annexed in 1967. Those communities in the Golan have been divided from their family members. … [S]o for those Druze in the Golan who have been fairly loyal to Israel, they haven’t necessarily taken citizenship because they don’t want to fight their cousins, but they have been generally loyal. … [S]o these Druze were, let’s just say, very much agitating for Israel to defend their cousins, and many of them were, in fact, going across the border to see family, and also some youth were maybe going to potentially fight alongside the Druze in southern Syria.”

Nolte further detailed a “practical” reason for Israel’s Syria operations. “[T]he Golan Heights are part of Israeli sovereign territory, and so having a little bit of a buffer and having some Druze communities on the Syrian side of the border that would have positive feelings toward Israel provides defense and depth on that northern flank. … I think that one day there can be normalization with Syria, but from the Israeli perspective, hope is not a strategy. The Druze are a known quantity; their loyalty is known. And I think for [Israel], it’s a strategic choice between the Druze and the unknown.”

Meanwhile, a distressing account from the SOHR reported that 194 Druze civilians were “summarily executed by [Syrian] defence and interior ministry personnel.” In addition, 128,000 civilians living in Suwayda have been displaced by the violence, according to the U.N.

Still, the Trump administration is signaling its support of the new Syrian government, saying there is “no Plan B” for stabilizing the country after years of civil war. U.S. envoy Tom Barrack further criticized Israel’s intervention, saying that while the Jewish state has its own prerogative to defend itself, the strikes created “another very confusing chapter” and “came at a very bad time.” He also contended that Syrian authorities “need to be held accountable” for killings of civilians.

Nolte argued that the apparent differences between the U.S. and Israel are likely the result of strategic diplomacy that the Trump administration is attempting to carry out.

“I think we should always keep in mind with President Trump that he has a lot of irons in the fire in the Middle East,” he pointed out. “… [B]y criticizing Israel’s strikes on Damascus, he allows himself to be positioned as sort of an honest broker between Syria and Israel, because if he comes out in support of … Netanyahu’s strikes in Damascus on Syrian military targets … it becomes much more difficult for him to then try to negotiate between Israel and Syria as an honest broker. So I think there’s a lot of careful diplomacy that is going into the distance that appears to be publicly created. … I think Trump is playing Middle Eastern politics and is probably playing the hand he’s been dealt about as well as he can.”

At the same time, experts like John Bolton, who served as national security adviser during the first Trump administration, say that the new Syrian government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda member, has much to prove before it can be trusted.

“[I]t’s complicated like many things in the Middle East,” he acknowledged during “This Week on Capitol Hill” over the weekend. “You can say for sure, this new regime in Syria is very anti-Iran. That’s quite important to Israel to cut off the supply of weapons and other equipment to Hezbollah, one of Iran’s terrorist proxies in Lebanon. But the new government in Damascus itself has a history of terrorism. The new government is … saying they’re renouncing it to get better relations with the West. But the treatment of the minority of religious populations in Syria is a very important question.”

Bolton continued, “My personal view is the new regime in Syria has really not proven satisfactorily that it has renounced its terrorist past, and this is important because you don’t want a new Syrian government to consolidate control over the whole territory, including in the northeast, where American allies — Kurdish fighters — are holding approximately 10,000 ISIS terrorist prisoners. We don’t want that to happen unless we’re really sure that this regime wants to turn a page. We don’t need another terrorist government in the Middle East. We don’t need an Afghanistan on the Mediterranean. So I think we should be cautious. I certainly welcome the regime being against Iran, but there are just a significant number of other questions that remain unresolved.”

Bolton, who formerly served as ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, went on to argue that there is much that the Syrian government can do to prove that they are not a threat to the West, including opening the books on the regime of former dictator Bashar al-Assad and booting out Russia.

“I’d like to know … everything in the Assad regime files on American hostages that were taken over the past many years, or the hostages really from anywhere else,” he observed. “I’d like to know about the Assad government’s pursuit of chemical and biological weapons. Open the files. If you’re not a terrorist yourself, you don’t have any need of chemical or biological weapons. Let’s find out where the Assad regime purchased some of the critical elements of that program. And it would be nice as well to kick the Russians out of their naval base at Tartus and their air base in Latakia province in Syria, while we’re at it. So there’s some concrete things the new regime could do, I think, to establish their bona fides. But they haven’t done it yet.”