Once again, images of horrifying violence are pouring out of Syria: dead bodies piled up in a hospital corridor. Gunmen calling out insults as they drive their cars over the corpses of murdered civilians.

As alarming sectarian violence swept through Syria in the third week of July, Christian communities in the region experienced a new wave of persecution. Attacks on the country's Christian, Druze and Alawite communities were perpetrated mainly by Islamist jihadists.

Several days of bitter sectarian fighting in the south of Syria has brought the fledgling government in Damascus dangerously close to direct conflict with Israel, after Israeli warplanes launched strikes against government buildings in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on July 16.

In March, government forces were involved in a killing spree on the Syrian coast that left dead about 1,600 people, mostly from the Alawite minority, according to the Observatory. Another outbreak of violence just outside Damascus in May killed more than 100 people, mostly from the Druse minority.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based war monitor, said the clashes started after members of a Bedouin tribe in Sweida province set up a checkpoint where they attacked and robbed a Druze man, leading to tit-for-tat attacks and kidnappings between the tribes and Druze armed groups.

Amid violent clashes in southern Syria’s Sweida governorate, a picture of grave human rights abuses and rising humanitarian needs is emerging by the hour, the UN said on Friday.