TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — At least 10 people were killed and several others, including children, were wounded in a rocket attack on a soccer field in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights on Saturday, hours after an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed three members of the militant Hezbollah group.
The attack, the deadliest on an Israeli target since fighting between the two foes broke out in October, raised fears of wider chaos in the region.
Hezbollah says the attack on a military base in the Golan Heights is in retaliation for Israeli attacks on a village in Lebanon.
Mohammed Afif, Hezbollah spokesman, told the Associated Press news agency that the group “categorically denies carrying out an attack on Majdal Shams.”
The Israeli military said in a statement on Saturday that according to intelligence it had, “the rocket launch toward Majdal Shams was carried out by the terrorist organization Hezbollah.”
“The terrorist organization Hezbollah is behind the rocket launch at a football field in Majdal Shams, which killed several civilians, including children, earlier this evening,” the statement said.
Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service initially reported 11 injuries, nine of them serious. All were aged between 10 and 20. Israel’s public broadcaster Kan broadcast footage of people being carried on stretchers from a football field in the town of Majdal Shams to ambulances.
“These were children on a football field,” Beni Ben Muvchar, head of the local council, told Israel’s Channel 12. “Today a red line has been crossed,” he said, urging Israeli leaders to target Hezbollah’s top commanders.
The Israeli military said a projectile had been identified as having been launched from Lebanon into the area, adding that it was working with the MDA to evacuate the wounded. Channel 12 broadcast footage of a large explosion in one of the city’s valleys.
Hezbollah said in a statement that its militants fired Katyusha rockets at an Israeli army post in the Golan Heights in response to Israeli airstrikes on villages in southern Lebanon. The group said earlier that three of its members were killed on Saturday, without specifying where. The Israeli military said its air force struck a Hezbollah weapons depot in the border village of Kfar Kila, adding that militants were inside at the time.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during the Middle East War in 1967 and later annexed it in 1981.
Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire almost daily since the war in Gaza began after a surprise Hamas attack on Oct. 7, which killed some 1,200 people and took 250 hostage. Israel launched an offensive that has so far killed more than 39,000 people, according to local health authorities, displaced more than 80 percent of the territory’s population and created a humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip.
In recent weeks, gunfights along the Lebanon-Israel border have intensified, with Israeli airstrikes and rocket and drone attacks by Hezbollah taking place further and further from the border.
Since early October, Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have killed more than 450 people, mostly Hezbollah members, but also about 90 civilians and non-combatants. On the Israeli side, 21 soldiers and 13 civilians have been killed.
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