A Village’s Anguish Over 12 Children Lost to a Rocket Strike

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A Village’s Anguish Over 12 Children Lost to a Rocket Strike

The rocket struck on the sideline of the pint-size soccer field, just inside a chain-link fence, where the children of Majdal Shams, a picturesque Druse ***** village in the ********-controlled Golan Heights, wait their turn to play, or just sit and watch.

On Sunday, a day after the deadly strike launched from Lebanon, a small crater about halfway between the goals was ringed by singed turf. A fortified concrete ***** shelter sat just steps away, now pockmarked by shrapnel, its entrance speckled with blood.

A siren warning of incoming rocket ***** had sounded at about 6:18 p.m. on Saturday, but the strike arrived within seconds, local residents said, and there was no time to run.

Jwan ******, 14, was standing by one of the goal posts at the time, watching a training session. He said he thought of running toward the shelter. But having grown used to the sirens during months of hostilities between ******* and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, he stayed where he was.

Twelve children, Druse ***** boys and ****** ranging in age from 10 to 16, were ******* by the blast, and dozens more were injured and taken to hospitals. ******* blamed the ******* on Hezbollah — which denied responsibility — and struck targets in Lebanon on Sunday, in what was seen as a restrained initial response. The ******** military said the type of rocket used in the ******* is Iranian-made and carries more than 50 kilograms of explosives. Hezbollah is the only group in Lebanon that possesses such rockets, the military said.

Jwan, who was spared injury in the *******, returned to the field the next day. The charred skeleton of his all-terrain vehicle lay outside the ***** shelter alongside blackened scooters and bicycles. Two of his cousins ***** in the strike, he said. He saw their bodies lying one on top of the other, as well as body parts.

He said he had not managed to cry yet. His mother, Samera ******, 40, said he was still in shock.

A stunned hush of collective mourning fell over Majdal Shams, a town of about 11,000 people on the slopes of Mount Herman, for much of Sunday. Stores and restaurants were shuttered. Weddings were postponed. People, young and old, stopped to hug each other in the streets, in tears. The whole town wore ******.

Ten of the children were ******* in their family crypts in the town’s ********* on Sunday morning. An eleventh was ******* in Ein Qiniyye, one of the other three Druse villages in the ********-controlled Golan.

******* took control of the Golan Heights after the 1967 war with Syria and effectively annexed the area in 1981, in a move that most countries have not recognized. Many of the more than 20,000 Druse in the Golan have chosen not to take ******** citizenship, remaining as permanent residents. Some still identify as Syrian, but after more than five decades of ******** control, many now identify as Israelis.

The four Druse villages in the Golan, whose Arabic-speaking residents practice a religion often described as an offshoot of Ismaili Islam, are dominated by large extended families and interconnected by marriage. Everybody knows everybody, residents said.

A twelfth child, whose body was apparently so ravaged that it took time to identify, was publicly named late Sunday night as Jifara Ibrahim, 11.

After the funerals, a short ceremony took place on a larger soccer field adjacent to the smaller one. A row of 12 empty chairs in the center were swathed in ****** cloth. After a minute’s silence and some brief speeches, most of the crowd dispersed.

Rescue workers then began scouring the perimeter of the small field, near the ***** shelter, searching for the tiniest of human ********. They scraped what looked like pieces of charred flesh off the ground and the fence, collecting them in a plastic cup and a trash bag.

The quiet was broken now and again by flashes of anger.

“We want a response today, not tomorrow,” shouted Nasser Abu Saleh, 52, who was standing by the impact site and, like many here, is waiting for a major military action against Hezbollah. Four children from his extended family had been *******, he said, adding, “Let the army do the job.”

He and others called for the ****** of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, or for the burning of Lebanon.

“Yesterday we were here gathering body parts — heads, ears, arms, legs,” Mr. Abu Saleh said. “Even in the movies, I have never seen anything like this.”

When Bezalel Smotrich, *******’s far-right finance minister, entered the soccer field to join the memorial ceremony, crowds heckled him, shouting, “Where were you for the last 10 months?” — the ******* when Hezbollah has been ******* across the border — and “Get out of here!”

The centrist leader of the political opposition, Yair Lapid, was received more warmly.

“The children who were ******* here at this soccer field could have been any of our children, and so they are all of our children,” Mr. Lapid told the mourners. “The state’s job is to grant security to children. Children are not supposed to **** in the grown-ups’ wars,” he added.

“The state has *******, the government has *******, and we apologize to the families and ask for the forgiveness of these children,” he said.

Amira Abu Saleh, 38, the manager of the local council’s youth department, said the soccer field was a favorite meeting place for the village youths. Her own son Isian, 11, would have been there on Saturday had he not been tired out from his scouts camp the day before.

Ms. Abu Saleh said the residents were still in a fog. “When we wake up out of it, we will have demands,” she said. “But right now, we are still in the nightmare.”

Men in mourning sat under an awning outside the house of Veines Adham Safadi, 11, a girl ******* in the *******, in a narrow street just below the *********.

“This is a catastrophe,” said her uncle, Mahel Safadi, 42, an English teacher. “People haven’t absorbed the shock yet,” he said, adding that the mourning was collective, for all the children, and not just for his own little niece.

Veines was a kind girl who filled the house with joy, he said. He described her as a “true football fanatic” who supported Real Madrid.

The women of the family — Veines’s mother, grandmothers, aunts and cousins — were inside the house. Photos of Veines were stuck on the fridge door. She looked like an angel, smiling, in a pink, sparkling dress.

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