Sheikh Tarif, the spiritual leader of Israel’s Druze community, also drew the diplomats’ attention to the crimes committed against Druze women in the attacks on Sweida and the nearby Druze villages.

The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) was presented with evidence that Syrian Druze women were sexually assaulted during the recent waves of attacks committed by Damascus-backed militia groups in southern Syria.

The testimonies and evidence were presented to a panel after Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif, the spiritual leader of the Druze community in Israel, outlined the sexual violence and terrorism enacted on the Syrian community.

The panel had met to discuss how employing AI can "safely and ethically" amplify survivor testimonies.

AI was used to alter the faces of five separate survivors, so they could testify to the UN without compromising their anonymity. The testimonies presented included the lived experience of 14-year-old Noor from Sweida.

Explaining that AI was helping to anonymize her story to protect her life, the testimony described how, in July, a masked ISIS member entered her home. He took off her clothes, she recounted, and forced her to stand on a small freezer while he beat her so severely that her teeth were damaged.

Ignoring her screams, Noor testified to how he raped her and how 20 people had entered her home to threaten her family.

Israel's Druze provide a voice to Syrian women

"They violated women and girls inside their own homes and abducted others as captives without accountability," Sheikh Tarif told the panel, while asserting that "silence and denial" only served to "guarantee victory" to those who enacted the "sexual terrorism."

"Today, out of duty, ethics, and responsibility, we choose disclosure over silence, compassion and acceptance over blame and shame. We lift from our survivors the burden of stigma and forced guilt," he said, adding that the guilt and stigma belonged only to the men who carried out the sexual violence.

The UN must do more to address the war crimes and ethnic cleansing being carried out in Syria and help free the Druze hostages abducted during the waves of attacks, Sheikh Tarif demanded during his Monday address at the UN.

Part of the UN’s efforts, the sheikh demanded, should see the return of the hundreds of thousands of Druze civilians displaced by the repeated attacks committed by the new Syrian regime and Bedouin gangs.

He asked that the UN support the Syrian Druze community’s right to determine its own path and destiny, to manage its own affairs without any external interference.

Describing the "international silence" as "frightening," Sheikh Tarif said he was speaking on behalf of all the minorities who "live under the weight of terrorism."

"Five months ago, Sweida was subjected to a brutal and systematic terrorist campaign with a single and clear objective: to carry out a collective ethnic cleansing of the Syrian Druze community," he explained. "To erase its identity, its uniqueness and its history in the Middle East."

Speaking on the brutality of the attacks, Sheikh Tarif condemned the burning, looting, killing, kidnapping, and rapes carried out during the waves of attacks.

"Behind these so-called 'lawless groups,' as misleading media would have the world believe, stands the government which turned a blind eye and loosened the reins before the first target, the alawites," he continued, explaining how the regime later allowed attacks against Christian churches and, soon after, the Druze.

Syrian Druze massacred under Damascus regime

Thousands of people were killed in the waves of attacks on the Druze community, and an estimated 120,000 people were displaced.

Invading members of the Syrian regime and surrounding gangs also took men, women, and children hostage. While the exact number of people currently being held hostage is unknown, Israel’s embassy to the UN places the current figure above 300.

Beyond the attacks, Druze activists in Israel and in Syria have described the medical and resource embargoes arbitrarily imposed on the villages.

Authorities have reportedly restricted the entry of medicine, medical equipment, and food into the Druze villages, according to the Druze control and command center in Israel’s North, and the activists.