Hello and welcome to News Hour from the BBC World Service coming to you live from London.
I'm Julian Warricko.
We begin in Syria,
where long-running tensions between Druze and Bedouin tribes in the south of the country erupted into deadly sectarian clashes on Sunday,
and now, nearly a week on, there's no sign of the violence ending.
Indeed, reports today are of more serious clashes,
with reports of Bedouin tribes surrounding Sweta city.
And all this comes a day after government forces withdrew from the area.
The scale of the fighting is best illustrated by the numbers killed since Sunday.
At least 594 people.
That's according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group.
In recent days, as the fighting spread to other parts of the southern province,
the government of interim president Ahmad al-Sharra,
who led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad's regime by Islamist-led rebels in December,
announced that it would deploy the Interior and Defence Ministry's forces to restore stability.
That does not appear to have happened.
And the situation was complicated further when the Israeli military launched airstrikes in the area which they said were intended to protect the...
Lena Sinjab is the BBC's correspondent in the Syrian capital Damascus and has been following the latest developments in Sweta.
are.
supported by Israel according to them.