Israel’s military said it struck Hezbollah targets deep inside Lebanon and in the country’s southern region Sunday, after a rocket strike from Lebanon killed 12 people, mostly teenagers and children, on a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Israel’s military said it targeted Hezbollah weapons caches and militant infrastructure in Lebanon overnight, including in the areas of Chabriha, Borj El Chmali, Beqaa, Kfarkela, Rab El Thalathine, Khiam and Tayr Harfa.
Israel blamed the Saturday strike in Majdal Shams on Hezbollah, citing military intelligence and an assessment of the scene, and described it as the deadliest single attack on Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault. Hezbollah denied any connection to the attack. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top Israeli officials promised to retaliate against the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group, raising fears of a wider escalation in regional hostilities.
Netanyahu returned to Israel on Sunday from his visit to the United States and is set to meet with his security cabinet later in the day.
In a Sunday morning tweet, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant mourned the victims of the Majdal Shams attack and said all people living in the area “suffer” on account of Hezbollah. “We will ensure Hezbollah, the proxy of Iran, pays a price for this loss,” he wrote. Earlier, Netanyahu warned: “Hezbollah will pay a heavy price for this that it has not paid so far.”
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of life,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters at a Sunday news conference in Tokyo, where he has been meeting his Japanese counterparts. “Every indication is that indeed … the rocket was from Hezbollah,” he added.
While the Biden administration believes Hezbollah carried out the attack, the working assumption is that it was an accident, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive assessments. The person cautioned that U.S. officials don’t yet have a definitive conclusion about the intention behind the attack.
Fighting along the Lebanon-Israel border has intensified in recent months, with regular exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel’s military. For months, the United States has pushed to de-escalate hostilities on that front. Blinken reiterated Sunday that he and other top U.S. policymakers “don’t want to see the conflict escalate,” and that they were working to ease tensions and bring about a cease-fire deal in Gaza, which he said would reduce flare-ups on the Israel-Lebanon border.
Bou Habib, the Lebanese foreign minister, told Reuters that the United States had asked the Lebanese government to pass on a message of restraint to Hezbollah, too.
Hundreds of mourners gathered in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, home to the Arabic-speaking ethnic Druze community, on Sunday for the funeral of those killed in the rocket attack. The spiritual leader of the community, Sheikh Muwafek Tarif, described it as a day of mourning in an interview to Israeli news outlet Ynet. He said there was a lot of anger in the community and questioned what the Israeli government had done for the area’s security.
“Harming civilians is a black line. The government must bring security to the residents,” he said.
Assad Abu Saleh, who lives in Spain but was visiting relatives in Majdal Shams when the strike occurred, said several of the victims belonged to his extended family. “It’s a catastrophe,” he told The Washington Post during the funerals Sunday. He saw “parts of bodies” and people without heads at the site, he said.
“This war, this stupid war, has to come to an end,” he said. But he could not see the end. “Both sides are too stubborn to settle for negotiations.”
Majd Abu Saleh, an engineer, said he was about 160 feet away when the projectile landed. “All our children, all the time, they are playing” in the soccer field. His 9-year-old daughter left the field about five minutes before the strike, he said, and three of her friends were killed.
Video he recorded when he arrived showed a terrible scene: at least nine children in soccer jerseys and cleats, motionless, their bodies contorted or pierced by shrapnel on the green field.
“I wish to be finished with this tragedy and this crazy war,” said Fawzi Abu Jaber, 72, who said he has lived his whole life in Majdal Shams. The United States, he said, “must back peace, not the war, and not the Israeli government, which doesn’t want peace. Not in Lebanon and in Gaza but in all the Middle East.”
Paramedics arrived at the soccer field Saturday to a “very difficult scene,” said United Hatzalah, an Israeli volunteer-based emergency medical services organization. Dozens of children lay injured. Nine of the victims were declared dead on the scene because of the severity of their injuries, the group said in an email. Israel’s military said those injured and killed were between 10 and 20 years old.
The Golan Heights, where Majdal Shams is located, is a 500-square-mile strip along the border between Syria and Israel that was seized by Israel in 1967 and formally annexed in 1981. In 2019, President Donald Trump upended years of the status quo by making the United States the only country apart from Israel to recognize it Israeli territory.
“There is no doubt that Hezbollah has crossed all the red lines here, and the response will reflect that,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz told Channel 12 on Saturday, adding: “We are nearing the moment in which we face an all-out war against Hezbollah and Lebanon.” A 34-day-war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 left hundreds of soldiers and civilians dead and injured on both sides. Hezbollah has since received large shipments of rockets and drones from Iran and produced its own weapons and has air defense capabilities.
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Iran’s Foreign Ministry warned Israel against any “new adventure” in Lebanon and backed Hezbollah’s assertion that the group was not behind the Majdal Shams attack. Spokesman Nasser Kanani said Israeli claims that Hezbollah is responsible for the strike are a “fake scenario” attempting to divert attention from the war in Gaza, according to a Foreign Ministry statement Sunday. The United States and the United Nations have a “moral responsibility” to prevent Israel “from starting a new fire whose flames will spread,” Kanani said.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock condemned the Majdal Shams strike on Sunday, adding, “It is important to act with cool heads. Far too many people have died already in this conflict.”
The attack in Majdal Shams followed a deadly strike in central Gaza, where local health authorities said at least 30 Palestinians were killed when Israel bombed a school that was sheltering displaced people. The Israel Defense Forces said it targeted a Hamas command and control center inside the Khadija school compound.
At least 39,324 people have been killed and 90,830 injured in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and says 329 soldiers have been killed since the launch of its military operation in Gaza.
Heidi Levine, Kareem Fahim, Michael Birnbaum, Alon Rom and Lior Soroka contributed to this report.
