BEIRUT: Rebels surrounded a government-held Druze village on the Syrian side of the cease-fire line on the Golan Heights Wednesday after heavy fighting, a monitoring group said.

The advance came a day after Israel, with a significant Druze minority, said it was preparing for the possibility that people fleeing fighting might seek to cross to the Israeli-occupied side of the strategic plateau.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was “closely following what is happening close to our borders,” and that he had “given instructions to do what is necessary.”

He did not elaborate.

After fierce clashes with loyalists, rebels, including Islamist fighters, surrounded the village of Hader, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights activist group said.

“Hader is now totally surrounded by rebels, who just took a strategic hilltop north of the village,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

The village lies along the cease-fire line, with the Israeli-occupied Golan to the west and the border with Damascus province to the northeast.

Abdel Rahman said the rebels had received reinforcements from elsewhere in Qunaitra province, which covers much of the Golan.

“The regime has not sent reinforcements yet, but the Druze villagers are standing with the government,” he added.

Fighting around Hader, which began Tuesday, has killed at least 10 rebels and 14 loyalists so far, he said.

The encirclement of Hader comes amid rising fears in Syria’s Druze community. Last week, 25 Druze villagers were killed in an altercation with members of Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate the Nusra Front in Idlib province in the northwest.

Shortly afterward, rebels in southern Syria briefly overran a government air base in majority-Druze Swaida province, in their first such advance in the government-controlled region. While the rebels were eventually expelled from the base, fighting has continued nearby.

The Druze community – which made up around 3 percent of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million – has been somewhat divided during the war, with some members fighting on the government side and others expressing sympathy for the opposition.

Thousands of Druze men have evaded military service in the Syrian army’s dwindling ranks and have mostly taken up arms only in defense of their own areas.

In Swaida, Druze have formed a local militia to protect themselves from the rebels, residents say.

Officials say there are 110,000 Druze in northern Israel, and another 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan.

Israeli chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot Tuesday said authorities were preparing for a possible influx of Syrian refugees.

A spokesman confirmed he was referring to a potential influx from areas adjacent to the cease-fire line on the Golan.

His comments did not directly mention the Druze, but came after leading members of the minority in Israel called on the government to help their brethren in Syria following the recent violence.

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometers of the plateau in the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed it in a move never recognized by the international community.

Insurgents fighting in Swaida province further east had failed during recent fighting to capture a main road to Damascus, and it was not clear whether they could secure a route to the capital in this latest offensive, Abdel Rahman said.

Different groups, including ISIS and the Nusra Front, have been putting Assad under heavy pressure in various parts of the country in the past two months. Another insurgent alliance including Nusra Front has taken hold of the northwestern Idlib province, edging closer to Assad’s coastal stronghold, while ISIS fighters overran the central city of Palmyra last month.

The government says it can defend important stretches of territory in Syria’s populous west and the deputy foreign minister told Reuters last week that Damascus was safer than toward the start of the conflict, which grew out of protests against Assad in 2011.

Despite surviving more than four years of civil war, the Syrian regime might still fall, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Wednesday.

“We would like to see a transition in which Assad disappears from the scene,” Carter testified before the House of Representatives’ Armed Services Committee. “That is possible because his forces are much weakened.”

Government forces are more and more isolated in and around Damascus and in the Alawite-majority region of the northwest of the country, Carter said.

“The best way for the Syrian people for this to go would be for him to remove himself from the scene,” Carter added.

At least 33 people were killed Tuesday in the Damascus region as the army bombarded a rebel-held town and the rebels fired rockets into the capital, the Observatory said Wednesday.

At least 24 people, including five children, were killed by government airstrikes and rocket fire on Douma, a rebel-held suburb some 10 kilometers northeast of the center of Damascus, the Observatory said.