At least 12 children from the Druze community were killed and around 30 others were wounded early Saturday evening in a rocket attack from Lebanon aimed at a soccer field in the northern Israeli town of Majdal Shams.
All the murdered were children, including four brothers from the same family. Seventeen of the wounded were listed in critical condition.
“Reports from the scene were very difficult; they were scenes out of a battlefield,” Magen David Adom (MDA) CEO Eli Bin said in a statement.
According to Israeli journalist Nir Dvori of Channel 12 News, the rocket that struck the soccer field was a “Grad 122 with 18 kilograms of explosives and shrapnel. The children were crowded in the soccer field, in the corner where the rocket hit.”
Later IDF reports said the rocket that struck Majdal Shams was an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket, a 240 mm unguided surface-to-surface rocket that carries a 50 kilogram explosive warhead. This is a rocket that only Hezbollah uses. The IDF identified the commander of this rocket unit as Ali Muhammad Yichya.
The Hezbollah-linked Al Mayadeen news outlet reported that more than 100 munitions were fired at northern Israel in a period that lasted more than an hour, following the elimination of a senior operative in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force.
The rocket that hit Majdal Shams was fired at approximately 6:19 pm during that barrage.
More than 50 people — most of them children, were in the soccer field at the time of the attack. The rocket landed near the exit of a field where youth soccer league teams of children ages eight to ten were playing. They were rushing for the exit to reach the nearby bomb shelter when the rocket landed.
From the initial IDF inquiry into the incident, an alert was activated, but it was an immediate alert that was too short. “At the moment it appears that this was a single rocket. We are now looking into this in-depth and will release the details transparently to the public,” the IDF said.
“We arrived at the area and saw damage and belongings set on fire,” senior MDA paramedic Idan Avshalom said. “The injured were lying on the grass, and the scenes were difficult to see. We began treating the injured immediately. Some of them were evacuated to local clinics.”
“The Hezbollah terrorist organization is behind the rocket launch at a soccer field in Majdal Shams which caused multiple civilian casualties, including children, earlier this evening,” the IDF emphasized.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, IDF Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi, the heads of the Shin Bet and Mossad intelligence agencies and other senior defense officials conducted ongoing situational assessments following the attack.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was briefed and held an initial situation assessment with his Military Secretary, Maj.-Gen. Roman Gofman in the United States, where he had remained for Shabbat. He was scheduled to hold a further security assessment later with all heads of the security establishment, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement at around 9 pm Saturday night (Israel time).
A scared Hezbollah has denied launching the rocket and ordered all their people to find safe locations to hide. The question is, is Hezbollah more afraid of the impending Israeli response, or the response of the Druze community in Lebanon?
