Druze Arabs in Syria have long been loyal to
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Despoiler of Deraa...
, and their brethren in Israel and the Golan Heights, which Israeli forces captured in 1967, have been lobbying the Netanyahu government to safeguard the community.
The Israelis, however, have sought to keep out of the more than four-year-old insurgency against Assad, an old foe who, they fear, may be toppled by more hostile Islamist Lion of Islams.
But in a rare spillover of Syria's sectarian conflict into the Golan, a Druze mob last week beat to death a civil war casualty who was being taken by ambulance to Israel, where hundreds of Syrian maimed have received treatment during the conflict.
Israel has said it has also sent food and water across the frontier.
Briefing news hounds on Monday, Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said that, from the outset, Israel knew there were rebels among those it was helping and "placed two conditions on this aid - that terrorist groups not approach the fence, and that the Druze not be touched".
He was referring to the southern Syrian Druze village of Hader on which rebels have encroached, setting off solidarity protests in the Golan and Israel where the Druze are an Arab minority with influence in the military and government.
Another Israeli defence official said that while Israel has not refused medical treatment to any Syrian approaching its lines, "later, when it became clear that they were rebels, we made sure that they understood we expected our conditions to be kept".