Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service.
We're coming to you live from London this Wednesday with me, Sean Lay.
Live reporting on Syrian television as a journalist reacts to an airstrike on the building behind them.
Israel's targets in Damascus included the presidential palace and the defence ministry.
Syria's government has asked the UN Security Council to meet to address what it calls Israeli aggression on Syrian territory.
In Washington the Trump administration, which has lifted sanctions imposed on Syria during President Assad's regime, expressed its concern.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said officials were working the phones.
We've been engaged with them all morning long and all night long with both sides and we think we're on our way towards a real de-escalation and then hopefully get back on track in helping Syria build a country and arriving at a situation there in the Middle East is far more stable.
So in the next few hours we hope to see some real progress to end what you've been seeing over the last couple hours.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he'd ordered the intervention to protect the Druze, a minority community facing attacks in the southwest of Syria.
My brothers, the Druze citizens of Israel, the situation in Sweda in southwestern Syria is very serious.
The IDF is operating, the air force is operating, other forces are operating.
We are acting to save our Druze brothers and to eliminate the regime's gangs.
Dr Robert Geist-Pinfold is lecturer in defence studies at King's College London.
He's been telling me first who the Druze in Syria and outside Syria are.
Well, the Druze are a rather esoteric sect.
They are originally an offshoot of Islam, but they have elements of other monotheistic religions as well.
They're quite a secretive group.
There are around 700,000 of them within Syria.
And what's important to note is there are also 140,000 of them.