Majdal Shams:
A rocket fired from Lebanon hit a football pitch in an Arab town in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights on Saturday, killing 11 young men in what the army described as the “deadliest attack on Israeli civilians since October 7”.
The army said the Lebanese group Hezbollah fired the deadly rocket that killed the young men aged between 10 and 20 when they were hit in the field in the town of Majdal Shams.
Many of the city’s residents maintain Syrian nationality decades after the territory was occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
The rocket fire came after an Israeli strike killed four Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, prompting the Iran-backed militant group to announce a series of retaliatory rocket attacks on the Golan and northern Israel.
Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said on
“We will prepare for a response against Hezbollah… we will act,” Rear Admiral Hagari said in a video statement, adding that the rocket launch was the “deadliest attack on Israeli civilians since October 7,” when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, triggering war. in Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who returned early from a visit to the United States, promised that “Israel will not let this murderous attack go unanswered.”
“Hezbollah will pay a high price for this, a price it has never paid before,” he warned in a statement released by his office.
– ‘Just crime’ playing football –
Israeli President Isaac Herzog accused Hezbollah of having “brutally attacked and murdered children today, whose only crime was going out to play football.”
Hezbollah denied being responsible for the deadly attack.
“The Islamic Resistance has no connection with this incident,” he said, referring to its military wing.
Police and the army said the rocket fired at Majdal Shams was part of a barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon that hit several locations in the Golan.
Ambulances, helicopters and mobile intensive care units were sent to the scene, the Army said.
“We arrived at a football field and saw destruction and burning objects. Injured people were lying on the grass,” paramedic Idan Avshalom said in a statement released by Magen David Adom.
An AFP correspondent saw doctors taking the injured for treatment.
“Officers and bomb disposal experts from North District Police are currently securing the area and searching for additional (rocket) remains to eliminate any additional risk to the public,” police said in a separate statement.
The rocket fire came after a Lebanese security source said an Israeli strike killed four Hezbollah fighters in the southern village of Kfar Kila.
Hezbollah, which has exchanged almost daily cross-border fire with the Israeli army since the Gaza war broke out last October, confirmed the deaths of four of its fighters.
It claimed to have carried out a dozen retaliatory strikes against Israeli targets, nine of them in the space of two hours.
Violence since October has killed at least 527 people in Lebanon, according to an AFP report. Most of the dead were combatants, but they included at least 104 civilians.
On the Israeli side, 18 soldiers and 24 civilians were killed, according to Israeli authorities.
The war in Gaza broke out after the Hamas attack on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP report based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 39,258 people, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-controlled territory, which does not provide details on civilian and militant deaths.
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