Binyamin Netanyahu sees an opportunity for Israel to escalate the war to Lebanon
The Israeli military has blasted at least seven targets deep inside Lebanon, deliberately creating the conditions for further and wider all-out war.
Israel’s air force says it has hit the Hezbollah resistance group in Lebanon. It came after 12 children and young adults were killed in a rocket attack while playing football in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Israel blamed Hezbollah for Saturday’s attack on the Arab Druze town of Majdal Shams, but Hezbollah has strongly denied any involvement. The resistance group’s spokesperson Mohamad Afif denied responsibility for the attack. He told the United Nations that an Israeli interceptor rocket caused the explosion.
Majdal Shams is one of four villages in the Golan Heights, where about 25,000 members of the Arabic-speaking Druze religious and ethnic group live.
Before reports of the strike’s impact emerged, Hezbollah had claimed responsibility for four other attacks. One was on a nearby military compound on the slopes of Mt Hermon, which lies on the border between Israel and Lebanon. The base is around 2 miles from the football pitch.
Israel fired interceptor rockets in an effort to defend their occupation forces. Israeli politicians are using the deaths in Majdal Shams to stoke more killing and to further draw the United States into battles in the Middle East.
Bezalel Smotrich, the far right finance minister in Binyamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet, said, “For the death of small children, Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah should pay with his head. Lebanon as a whole has to pay the price. It’s time for action!”
But anger against Israel surged during the victims’ funerals on Sunday.
“Now you come here? Ten months you didn’t come!” a man shouted at housing minister Nir Barkat and environmental protection minister Idit Silman. His comments were met with applause.
“We’re tired of your promises!” another person reportedly yelled at Smotrich.
In a video posted on social media, hecklers surrounded Smotrich, cursing and saying, “We don’t want him!”, according to a Times of Israel translation.
Israeli media reported that a leader of the Druze community had asked in a letter that government ministers not attend the funeral to avoid turning the tragedy into a “political event”.
Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War. Most of the Syrian Arab inhabitants fled the area during the conflict.
It placed the area under military control and settlers grabbed the land. Syria tried to retake the Golan Heights during the 1973 Middle East war. Despite inflicting heavy losses on Israeli forces, the assault was repulsed.
Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally—although the US Donald Trump administration did so unilaterally in March 2019.
There are more than 30 Israeli settlements in the Golan–illegal under international law which Israel spurns.
The 20,000 settlers live alongside a similar number of Syrians, most of them Druze Arabs, who did not flee when the Golan was captured.
Syria has always insisted that it will not agree to a peace deal with Israel unless it withdraws from the whole of the Golan.
Omar Baddar, a Middle East political analyst, said on Sunday he believes the rocket attack on the Golan Heights was “almost certainly an accident”.
“No party in the entire region has either a political interest or a military interest in targeting a kid’s soccer game in a Druze town in the occupied Golden Heights,” he said.
But he added, “If this incident were to take place a thousand times over, it still would not even come close to the number of Palestinian children that Israel has killed in the Gaza Strip.
“And even if you isolate Saturday alone, you have Israeli attacks across Gaza that have killed more than 50 Palestinians. So those ought to be much bigger news, if you’re looking specifically at the numbers and the scale of the casualties.
“Yet nobody looks at this as a crisis, simply because we’ve normalised Palestinian death. And what Israel basically is suggesting here is that the status quo ought to be an environment in which Israel can slaughter Palestinians by the thousands, with complete and total impunity.”
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