Israel Strikes Deep in Lebanon after Rocket Attack, Stoking Fear of Wider War

The Washington Post / Heidi Levine, Rachel Pannett, Niha Masih, Kareem Fahim, Jennifer Hassan, Steve Hendrix

17:14 JST, July 29, 2024

MAJDAL SHAMS, Golan Heights – Israel struck Hezbollah targets deep inside Lebanon on Sunday, officials said, the day after a rocket strike from Lebanon killed 12 people, most of them teenagers and children, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, raising the specter of all-out war.

Sunday’s strikes, on what the Israeli military said were Hezbollah weapons caches and infrastructure, fell short of the furious response Israeli officials threatened after the strike Saturday on a soccer field in the Golan where children were playing. Diplomats worked feverishly Sunday to blunt any Israeli retaliation. Lebanon’s government, which would suffer from any escalation, entreated the United States to urge restraint from Israel, Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib told Reuters.

Israel, citing military intelligence and an assessment of the scene, blamed the Saturday strike in Majdal Shams on Hezbollah, as did the United States. Hezbollah denied any connection to the attack.

It was the deadliest single attack on Israel since Hamas rampaged through several communities near the Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, drawing Israel’s military response there. The shocking scenes from the Golan – the bodies of children in weekend soccer clothes, blown apart – followed a flood of warnings from the United Nations and diplomats that months of largely contained fighting between Hezbollah and Israel along the border could ignite if given a deadly spark.

Egypt’s foreign ministry warned Saturday of the “dangers of opening a new war front in Lebanon” that could push the Middle East into a regional conflict, echoing admonitions from other Arab states over the dangers of failing to secure a cease-fire in Gaza. Hezbollah has said it would end its attacks against Israel in the event of such a cease-fire.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who returned to Israel on Sunday from his visit to Washington, was set to meet with his security cabinet.

In a Sunday morning tweet, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said he mourned the victims in Majdal Shams. “We live side by side and all suffer from Hezbollah’s terror,” he said in a message posted on X. “We will ensure Hezbollah, the proxy of Iran, pays a price for this loss.” Earlier, Netanyahu warned: “Hezbollah will pay a heavy price for this that it has not paid so far.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also expressed sorrow for the loss of life. “Every indication is that indeed … the rocket was from Hezbollah,” he told reporters in Tokyo, where he has been meeting with his Japanese counterparts.

“This attack was conducted by Lebanese Hezbollah,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement Sunday. “It was their rocket, and launched from an area they control.”

Watson said the United States is “working on a diplomatic solution along the Blue Line that will end all attacks once and for all, and allow citizens on both sides of the border to safely return to their homes.”

While the Biden administration believes Hezbollah carried out the attack, the working assumption is that it was an accident, according to a senior U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive assessments. The official cautioned that the administration hasn’t reached a conclusion about the intent 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. The United States has pushed to de-escalate hostilities there. Blinken said he and other top U.S. policymakers were working to ease tensions and bring about a cease-fire 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.

The daily tit-for-tat violence has already claimed dozens of lives. Before the strikes this weekend, at least 94 civilians and more than 300 Hezbollah fighters had been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, according to figures compiled this month by The Washington Post.

Hundreds of mourners gathered Sunday in a community center in Majdal Shams, a predominantly Druze town in the Golan, for the funeral of those killed in the rocket attack. Sheikh Muwafek Tarif, spiritual leader of the Arab-speaking ethnic Druze in Israel, said it was a day of mourning. There’s much anger in the community, he told the Israeli news outlet Ynet, and he asked what the Israeli government had done for the area’s security.

“Harming civilians is a black line,” he said. “The government must bring security to the residents.”

Assad Abu Saleh, who lives in Spain but was visiting relatives in Majdal Shams when the projectile struck, said several of the victims belonged to his extended family. “It’s a catastrophe,” he told The Post during the funeral Sunday. He saw “parts of bodies,” he said, and headless torsos.

“This war, this stupid war, has to come to an end,” Abu Saleh said, but he was not optimistic. “Both sides are too stubborn to settle for negotiations.”

Majd Abu Saleh, an engineer, said he was about 160 feet away from the strike. “All our children, all the time, they are playing” on the field. His 9-year-old daughter had left about five minutes before the strike, he said, but three of her friends were killed.

Footage he recorded when he arrived, which The Post reviewed, 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.

Fawzi Abu Jaber, 72, said he has lived his whole life in Majdal Shams. “I wish to be finished with this tragedy and this crazy war,” he said. 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 emergency medical services organization. Dozens of children lay injured. Nine victims were declared dead on the scene based on the severity of their injuries, the group said. Israel’s military said the victims were between 10 and 20 years old.

The Golan Heights is a 500-square-mile strip along the border between Syria and Israel that Israel seized 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 as 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. “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 wounded or dead on both sides. Hezbollah has since received large shipments of rockets and drones from Iran and produced its own weapons. It has air defense capabilities.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Sunday that the last diplomatic chance to avert a wider war was to push Hezbollah forces away from Israeli territory as stipulated by the 18-year-old U.N. Security Council measure that ended the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.

Resolution 1701 calls for the removal of armed personnel and weapons, apart from those belonging to the Lebanese army or a U.N. force, from an area between the temporarily negotiated border, the Blue Line, and Lebanon’s Litani River, which runs roughly parallel to the frontier about 18 miles north.

An Israeli official familiar with internal deliberations said the militant group has long violated the resolution’s ban on forces and weapons in the area, encroachments that grew more blatant after the start of the Gaza war. Some Hezbollah positions are within yards of the Blue Line.

“We pulled back across the Blue Line,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. “They are in gross violation. They need to pull back, and this is pretty much the last minute for them to.” Lebanon has accused Israel of thousands of violations of 1701, including routine and provocative Israeli encroachments of its airspace, and continued occupation of Lebanese territory in the border area.