On Saturday, a rocket fired from Lebanon hit a soccer field in an Arab town in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, killing 11 young men in what the army described as the “deadliest attack on Israeli civilians since October 7”.
The Lebanese group Hezbollah fired deadly rockets, killing young people aged between 10 and 20 on the ground in the town of Majdal Shams, the army said.
Many of the city’s residents retain Syrian nationality, even decades after the area was captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
The rocket attack came a day after an Israeli strike killed four Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, prompting the Iran-backed militant group to announce retaliatory rocket attacks against the Golan and northern Israel.
Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said on X that 11 youths were killed in the attack, while emergency service Magen David Adom said 19 others were injured when a rocket fell in Majdal Shams.
“We will prepare a response against Hezbollah… we will take action,” Rear Admiral Hagari said in a video statement. He said the rocket attack was “the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians since October 7” when Hamas militants launched a war in Gaza by attacking southern Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was returning early from a visit to the United States, vowed that “Israel will not go without responding to this murderous attack”.
“Hezbollah will pay a heavy price for this, a price it has never paid before,” he warned in a statement released by his office.
– Playing ‘offense only’ football –
Israeli President Isaac Herzog accused Hezbollah of “brutally attacking and killing children today whose only crime was that they went to play soccer.”
Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the deadly attack.
It said “the Islamic Resistance has nothing to do with this incident,” referring to its military wing.
Police and army said the rocket fired at Majdal Shams was part of a barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon that struck several places in the Golan.
The army said ambulances, helicopters and mobile intensive care units were deployed to the scene.
“We arrived at a football field and saw devastation and objects on fire. Injured people were lying on the grass,” paramedic Idan Avshalom said in a statement released by Megan David Adom.
An AFP correspondent saw medics taking the injured for treatment.
“North District Police officers and police bomb disposal experts are currently securing the area and searching for additional (rocket) remains to eliminate any threat to the public,” police said in a separate statement.
The rocket attack came after Lebanese security sources said four Hezbollah fighters were killed in an Israeli attack on the southern village of Kafr Qila.
Hezbollah, which has been engaged in almost daily cross-border firefights with Israeli forces since the Gaza war began last October, confirmed the deaths of four of its fighters.
It said it launched a dozen retaliatory attacks on Israeli targets, nine of them in a two-hour span.
At least 527 people have been killed in violence in Lebanon since October, according to an AFP report. Most of the dead are fighters, but at least 104 civilians are also among them.
According to Israeli officials, 18 soldiers and 24 civilians were killed on the Israeli side.
The war in Gaza, which began after a Hamas attack on October 7, has resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
At least 39,258 people have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, though the ministry did not give details of civilian and militant deaths.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
