Beirut (AFP) - Rebels surrounded a government-held Druze village on the Syrian side of the ceasefire line on the Golan Heights on Wednesday after heavy fighting, a monitoring group said.

The advance came a day after Israel, which has a significant Druze population, said it was preparing for the possibility that refugees fleeing fighting in the area might seek to cross to the Israeli-occupied side of the strategic plateau.

After fierce clashes with pro-government forces, rebels, including Islamist fighters, surrounded the village of Hader on Wednesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor 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 ceasefire line with the Israeli-occupied Golan to the west, and by the border with Damascus province to the northeast.

He said the rebels had received reinforcements from elsewhere in Quneitra province, which covers much of the Golan.

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A picture taken from the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights shows an Israeli soldier monitoring the Syria …

"The regime has not sent reinforcements yet, but the Druze villagers are standing with the government," Abdel Rahman said.

Fighting around Hader, which began Tuesday, has left at least 10 rebels and 14 pro-regime fighters dead so far, he added.

The encirclement of Hader comes amid rising fears in Syria's Druze community.

Last week, 20 Druze villagers were killed in an altercation with members of Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate Al-Nusra Front in Idlib province in the northwest.

Shortly after the deaths, rebel forces in southern Syria briefly overran a government air base in majority-Druze Sweida province, in their first such advance in the government-controlled region.

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A picture taken from the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights shows Druze men residing in Israel watching s …

While the rebels were eventually expelled from the air base, fighting has continued nearby.

The Druze are followers of a secretive offshoot of Shiite Islam, and made up around three percent of Syria's pre-war population of 23 million.

The community 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 defence of their own areas.

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

On Tuesday, Israel's chief of staff Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot 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 ceasefire 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.

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

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) of the plateau in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.

Sinabung - which killed 16 people in a fierce eruption last year - was continuing to belch out a thick plume of smoke high into the sky on Tuesday, covering homes far away with a coating of ash.

About 7500 residents have been evacuated from their villages following the weekend eruptions, disaster agency official Tri Budiarto told AFP.

They "left their homes on motorcycles, in cars and on military trucks. They were from six villages located in the danger zone south and southeast of the volcano," he said.

Several thousand people fled their homes at the start of the month when the alert status was lifted, and the total number of evacuees now stands at 10,714, said the disaster agency.

The evacuees are sheltering in government buildings and places of worship in Kabanjahe town, about 10 kilometres from Sinabung.

Volcanic activity remained high on Tuesday, with Sinabung spewing out rocks and hot gas over a distance of three kilometres four times since early morning, said Armen Putra, head of the volcano observation post.

"We could still feel tremors. Ash one to two millimetres thick covered roads and homes located 15 kilometres away," he said.

"It could take weeks before it eases, but for now, it is dangerous for people living nearby so we have recommended for them to evacuate."

After Sinabung rumbled back to life in 2013, more than 10,000 people fled from nearby villages. Some have returned home but more than 6000 of the original evacuees are still living in shelters.

The volcano has also had a devastating economic impact, with the disaster agency estimating it caused more than $100 million in damage last year and in 2013 in a broad range of areas, including infrastructure, farming and tourism.

Sinabung is one of 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia, which sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a belt of seismic activity running around the basin of the Pacific Ocean.

AFP

6:08AM BST 16 Jun 2015

What to do with all the dead fish? Officials scramble for solutions in the wake of another fish kill

As the Peconic River teems with thousands of dead fish after another bunker kill, town and county officials are struggling to find solutions to deal with the clean-up – and the stench.

“It’s totally disgusting,” said Joanne Tyte, who lives on Howell Lane on the Peconic River. “The smell is so bad that we can’t even go outside.”

Last month’s major fish kill washed up tens of thousands of dead bunker on shores from the Peconic River to the Peconic Bay after algal blooms starved the water – and its bunker fish – of oxygen. And last weekend, oxygen levels in the Peconic River once again dropped very low due to another algal bloom, triggering yet another fish kill.

Fortunately, this weekend’s kill appears to be smaller than last month’s, but it has washed up thousands more stinky dead fish near the homes of fish-weary residents who are still reeling from the remains of the last kill.

“Since June 7, we’ve had nothing but southerly winds, and that’s just been carrying that smell to our house,” said Jennifer Parillo, who lives on Riverside Drive. “It just hasn’t stopped. It keeps on coming.

“I don’t think you can count on the wind blowing to clean up this mess,” she added.

But for the moment, local officials are having a difficult time finding a better solution.

Dead bunker float near the Riverhead Yacht Club this morning. Photo: Peter Blasl

The sheer volume of dead fish that has washed up in marshland, which is inaccessible to nets, as well as on private property, where the town cannot trespass to remove the fish, has made cleanup “extremely difficult,” Town Supervisor Sean Walter says.

“There’s just not enough manpower in Riverhead to take care of this,” Walter said. “We’re doing everything we can to keep the public areas as clean as possible, but a lot of this is private property. Even if we had the manpower, we couldn’t go onto those properties.”

He pointed out the difficulty of cleaning out a private marina where dead fish tend to build up and sit in the stagnant water, such as the marina at the Moose Lodge. “We would need to take every single boat out of there to get those fish,” he said. “I don’t think that’s even possible.”

Marshy areas where the fish get caught in reeds and grasses pose another challenge. “There’s no way to remove those fish except by hand,” said Suffolk County Legislator Al Krupski.

Many of those marshy areas are also “environmentally sensitive,” Walter said. “You’d be doing more harm disturbing those areas than the good you’d be getting out of removing the fish,” he said.

And then there’s the question of what to do with the fish once they’re out of the water. Residents who bag dead fish from their private properties can call the town for pick-up. The town then transports the bagged fish to a disposal facility in Brookhaven, where the town is paying a premium to get rid of the smelly fish.

As for the fish the town removes itself with netting in the river, the town is currently working with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to find a place for them.

Krupski says he contacted the Long Island Farm Bureau to see about using the dead fish as fertilizer on local farms, which was a regular farming practice on Long Island in the 1800s.

But Walter is not fond of that solution. “We don’t want to put that smell in someone’s neighborhood,” he said. “In the 2009 kill, the town thought that was a good idea. But the stench in the neighborhood was unbearable.”

Large bunker kills are not unusual in the Peconic River, but they are usually a result of bluefish, bunker’s natural predator, chasing them into shallow, low-oxygen waters. This past weekend’s kill and the widespread fish kill in late May, however, were both caused by unusually high densities of algal blooms, which strip the water of its oxygen and leave very little for the large schools of bunker fish that have been dying off as a result.

Algal blooms have been measured this year at unprecedented levels in the Peconic River, Peconic Bay and Flanders Bay, according to Christopher Gobler, a Stony Brook University research professor who studies the Peconic estuary through the Long Island Coastal Conservation Research Alliance.

And as additional rainfall washes more nutrients into the water, which ultimately intensifies the algal blooms, more fish die-offs will remain a possibility throughout the season, he said.

“As long as large bunker schools persist, the threat remains, as the low oxygen levels and algal blooms will likely continue,” Gobler said.