Mourners from the Druze minority surround the bodies of some of the 12 children and teens killed in a rocket strike at a soccer field, in the village of Majdal Shams at the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights on July 28, 2024.Leo Correa/The Associated Press
Israel’s Defence Minister vowed on Sunday that Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia would pay a steep price for a rocket strike that killed 12 children, amid frantic diplomatic efforts to try and prevent an all-out war.
As night fell, Lebanon was bracing for retaliatory strikes, not knowing what form they would take. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned early from an official visit to the United States in the wake of the rocket attack.
After a 2½-hour meeting with his war cabinet, the Prime Minister’s office released only a curt statement: “The members of the Cabinet authorized the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister to decide on the manner and timing of the response against the Hezbollah terrorist organization.”
Reuters reported that Israeli jets hit targets in southern Lebanon on Sunday but left unclear was whether Israel would mount much stronger retaliation. There were reports that Hezbollah was evacuating sites it believed could be targeted, and The Globe and Mail witnessed two Lebanese military convoys heading north on Sunday – away from the southern border zone that has been the focus of most of the fighting so far.
Lebanon’s main carrier, Middle East Airlines (MEA), said it was postponing the arrival of six flights that were supposed to land in Beirut on Sunday evening, and several foreign carriers, including Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa, cancelled their flights outright. The U.S. State Department warned citizens to reconsider travel to Lebanon and “to monitor their flight status closely, to be aware that itineraries could change with little or no warning.”
Lebanon has only one civilian airport, the runways of which were destroyed by Israeli air strikes at the outset of the last major war between Israel and Hezbollah, in 2006.
The 12 children, all between the ages of 11 and 16, were killed Saturday when a rocket struck a soccer field in the town of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights. Thirty other people – all members of the Druze religious sect that lives in the mountainous region – were wounded in the attack.
“Yesterday was a dark Saturday for the Druze and for residents of the north. It’s a Saturday that will be engraved in memory as a low point in humanity, the killing of children. The scenes of horror will never be erased,” Druze spiritual leader Sheik Mowafaq Tarif said at a funeral for the victims on Sunday that drew thousands of mourners.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly wrote on social media that she was “horrified” by the attack on Majdal Shams, and reiterated Canada’s “demand that Iran and its affiliated terrorist groups refrain from destabilizing actions in the Middle East.” Hezbollah, like the Palestinian militant group Hamas, is backed by Tehran.
Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the strike, but acknowledged targeting a nearby Israeli base on Saturday in the Golan Heights, which Israel seized and annexed from Syria in a 1967 war. In a statement, the group said the incident could have been caused by Israeli air defence missiles that “missed and backfired.”
Israeli officials dismissed that version of events, as did their American allies. “This attack was conducted by Lebanese Hezbollah. It was their rocket, and launched from an area they control,” the White House said in a statement on Sunday.
“Hezbollah will not get away with this incident even with its ridiculous denials. They fired the shots – they will bear the consequences and they will pay a heavy price for their actions,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said after visiting the scene of the attack.
The incident was the most serious for Israel in terms of the number of civilians killed around the country’s northern border – in almost 10 months of tit-for-tat cross-border attacks between Hezbollah and Israel.
Speaking before the attack, Andrea Tenenti, spokesperson for the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, said he had been warning for months that a miscalculation could lead to a wider war.
“No one wants to start a wider conflict, although everyone is ready,” Mr. Tenenti said in an interview last week at UNIFIL headquarters in the southern Lebanese town of Naqoura that was interrupted by a siren warning of possible incoming fire. “Where is the red line? It’s difficult to say. I think they have adjusted their red lines, and maybe it’s not the same now as in October or November.”
Reuters reported on Sunday that the U.S. was pushing for the Lebanese government to “restrain Hezbollah.” Hezbollah, however, wields wide influence within the Lebanese government, and the country’s lightly equipped army doesn’t have the weaponry to confront the Iranian-backed militia, which has tens of thousands of fighters and an arsenal of sophisticated missiles.
In an interview with Lebanon’s al-Hadith television station, Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib suggested Hezbollah was willing to give in to a key Israeli demand and move its forces north of the Litani River – and away from the Israeli border – if Israel were to “stop its violations.” It wasn’t clear what Hezbollah was seeking in exchange for its withdrawal from much of southern Lebanon.
The conflict began in October, when Hezbollah began sending missiles and drones into Israel in what it called an act of solidarity with Hamas and the people of Gaza. Israel launched an invasion of Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, which left more than 1,100 people dead. Upward of 39,000 Palestinians have died in the resulting war, a count by the Gaza Health Ministry that does not differentiate between fighters and civilians.
The strike on Majdal Shams came hours after an Israeli air strike on a school in central Gaza, that the Health Ministry said killed at least 30 Palestinians, including 15 children, and injured more than 100 others. The Israeli military said that Hamas had been using the school as a command centre.
On the northern front, more than 450 Lebanese have died in the cross-border fire between Israel and Hezbollah, a number that includes 384 acknowledged members of Hezbollah. Eighteen Israeli soldiers and 24 civilians have been killed, and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from towns and villages on both sides of the border.
Foreign embassies in Beirut, including Canada’s, have been warning their citizens to avoid travel to Lebanon since October, and for those still here to make plans to leave. The Canadian embassy estimates that there are between 45,000 and 50,000 Canadian citizens in Lebanon, raising the possibility of another mass evacuation of Canadians like the one in 2006, when 14,000 citizens were evacuated by ferries to Cyprus and Turkey for onward flights to Canada.
“It’s all so volatile,” Marwan Hamadeh, a senior Lebanese Druze politician said in an interview last week in Beirut. He said Amos Hochstein, a White House envoy sent in June to try and calm the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, had warned about exactly the kind of scenario the region was now facing.
“Amos told me ‘If Hezbollah hits by error a school, or if Israel hits some refugee gathering, both sides will go into escalation. And at that time, Beirut will not be spared.’ I said ‘Beirut?’ and he said: ‘parts of Beirut.’”