JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hezbollah would “pay a heavy price” for a rocket strike that killed 11 people on a soccer field in the occupied Golan Heights on Saturday, sparking vehement denials of responsibility from the Lebanese militant group as the fallout tipped the two sides closer to all-out war.
“Israel will not move on after this murderous attack,” he said, as he prepared to return to Israel from the United States, according to a statement from his office. “Hezbollah will pay a heavy price for this that it has not paid so far.”
Israeli military leaders were meeting Saturday night to “prepare for a response against Hezbollah,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a news briefing. “We will finish our assessments and we will act.”
The IDF said the blast in Majdal Shams, which Israel annexed from Syria in 1981, was caused by an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket fired from across the border in southern Lebanon. At least 20 more people were wounded, the IDF said, adding that many of the casualties were children or young adults.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, swiftly denied any connection to the attack, saying in a statement that it “categorically denies all false claims in this regard.”
The Falaq-1, which Hezbollah began using against Israel in January, is an unguided, short-range surface-to-surface rocket “ideal for … fighting in dense urban areas,” according to Armament Research Services, a global weapons consultancy.
The strike drew sharp condemnations from Israeli officials amid fears that it would accelerate the now-daily exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah into a full-blown conflict. Warnings of such an eruption have grown more urgent in recent months, as fighting along the Lebanon-Israel border has intensified.
“For more than nine months, Hezbollah has been attacking our citizens in the north, firing thousands of rockets and missiles and UAVs … targeting families, homes and communities,” Hagari said.
The two heavily armed adversaries fought a bruising war in 2006 but left the border largely quiet for about 17 years after that. Hezbollah began its recent strikes on Israel soon after the Hamas-led attack on Israeli communities Oct. 7, which killed around 1,200 people. During this conflict, Palestinian factions, including Hamas, have occasionally claimed attacks against Israel from Lebanon.
This month, Hezbollah’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, vowed to retaliate against Israel for strikes that have killed Lebanese civilians, saying his group would hit new areas not previously targeted. About 100 civilians have been killed in Lebanon since October. In Israel, more than 20 civilians — including those killed Saturday — have died.
The group has launched rockets at Israel and recently sent surveillance drones over the port city of Haifa, evading Israeli air defenses. Nasrallah has also said Hezbollah would end its attacks if there was a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.
More than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed there 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.
Hezbollah announced earlier Saturday that Israel had killed four of its members, adding that it had also struck several military targets inside Israel. The targets included what Hezbollah called the Golani barracks, shown on a map that the group distributed as being just north of Majdal Shams.
The flare-up at the border set off a diplomatic scramble to prevent a wider conflagration. The Lebanese government said in a statement that it “condemns all acts of violence and aggression” and called for “an immediate cessation of hostilities on all fronts.”
The United Nations urged “maximum restraint” and “to put a stop to the ongoing intensified exchanges of fire.” In a joint statement, the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon and the commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission warned that the clashes “could ignite a wider conflagration that would engulf the entire region in a catastrophe beyond belief.”
The United States, which has been leading negotiations between Israel and Hezbollah, via intermediaries, also condemned what it said was a “horrific attack.”
“Our support for Israel’s security is iron-clad and unwavering against all Iranian backed terrorist groups, including Lebanese Hezbollah,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said in a statement.
The incident in Majdal Shams also 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 IDF said it targeted a Hamas position with “precision,” but the bombing left a massive crater and video and eyewitness testimonies from the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital suggested that most of the dead were civilians.
Around 4,000 people were staying in the Khadija School in Deir al-Balah, according to Gaza’s civil defense force. Video from the immediate aftermath of the attack showed bodies on the ground and bloodied children carried by adults. At the hospital, doctors said they had received patients with full-body burns or their limbs shorn off.
The IDF described the strike as targeting “terrorists operating a Hamas command and control center embedded inside the Khadija School in central Gaza” and said precautions were taken to “mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of appropriate munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence.”
Military experts caution that precision munitions still have the capacity to kill large numbers of people when they are used in densely populated areas. It was not clear which munitions were used in the strikes. A video from the scene, confirmed by the local civil defense force, appeared to show an unexploded U.S.-made small diameter bomb in the wreckage, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army bomb technician who reviewed the footage.
Yazan Ahmed, 33, whose tent is near the school, said the school was targeted with what appeared to be four missiles at around noon local time. He said he went to help rescue people from the school and “the scene cannot be described. The limbs were torn everywhere. They were all women and children whose bodies were torn apart.”
His description was echoed by other eyewitnesses. “There were victims everywhere,” said Fayez al-Toum, 21, who said he had been standing on the roof of another school building across the road when the attack began.
Most of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million population has been displaced by the conflict, as fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants has shunted much of the civilian population from north to south, and now back toward the enclave’s center.
The United Nations said this week that more than 190,000 Palestinians had been displaced from Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, to the south, in just four days, as the Israeli army issued evacuation orders ahead of military operations there. On Saturday, the military extended those instructions to southern neighborhoods of Khan Younis.
“Due to significant terrorist activity and rocket fire toward the State of Israel from the southern area of Khan Younis, remaining in this area has become dangerous,” the Israel Defense Forces said on X, warning that it was “about to forcefully operate” there and was adjusting the boundaries of an area that it has designated as a safe zone.
It was the second time in less than a week that Israel has ordered the evacuation of a former safe area. On Monday, the IDF ordered the evacuation of an eastern sector of the city of Khan Younis, including an area in the Mawasi neighborhood that was previously within the boundaries of a designated safe zone for displaced people. Israel said it was targeting Hamas militants who had been firing rockets from the area.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been sheltering in the safe zone area, having been displaced multiple times since the war began.
At a news briefing Friday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres described Gaza’s humanitarian crisis as a “disaster.” The displaced were now being told to move, he said, “in search of a safety that doesn’t exist.”
El-Chamaa and Fahim reported from Beirut and Harb and Cheung from London. Alon Rom and Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut and Tyler Pager from Washington contributed to this report.
