Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - July 29, 2024, Winnipeg, Manitoba TOP NEWS A3 MONDAY JULY 29, 2024 ● ASSOCIATE EDITOR, NEWS: STACEY THIDRICKSON 204-697-7292 ● CITY.DESK@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM Israel strikes Hezbollah targets in Lebanon M AJDAL SHAMS, Golan Heights — Israel’s military said it struck Hezbollah targets deep inside Lebanon Sunday after a rocket strike from Lebanon killed 12 people, most of them teenagers and children, on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, raising the specter of all-out war. Sunday’s strikes, on what the Israeli military said was 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 chil- dren were playing. Diplomats worked feverishly Sunday to blunt any Israeli retaliation. Lebanon’s government, which would suffer from any escala- tion, 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 strike in Majdal Shams Saturday on Hezbollah. Hezbollah denied any con- nection to the attack. Israel described it as the deadliest sin- gle attack on Israel since Hamas ram- paged 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 Sat- urday 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 Net- anyahu, who returned to Israel Sunday from his visit to Washington, was set to meet with his security cabinet. In a Sunday morning tweet, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said he mourned the victims in Majdal Shams: “We live side by side and all suffer from Hezbollah’s terror. We will ensure Hez- bollah, the proxy of Iran, pays a price for this loss.” Earlier, Netanyahu warned: “Hezbol- lah will pay a heavy price for this that it has not paid so far.” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blink- en 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 counter- parts. “This attack was conducted by Lebanese Hezbollah,” National Sec- urity Council spokesperson 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 be- lieves 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 assess- ments. The official cautioned that the admin- istration 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 work- ing 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 govern- ment to pass on a message of restraint to Hezbollah, too. The daily tit-for-tat violence has al- ready claimed dozens of lives. Before the strikes this weekend, at least 94 civilians and more than 300 Hezbol- lah fighters had been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon, according to fig- ures compiled this month by The Wash- ington Post. Hundreds of mourners gathered Sun- dayin 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 said 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 (49 metres) 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 ter- rible 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 organiz- ation. Dozens of children lay injured. Nine victims were declared dead on the scene based on the severity of their in- juries, 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 re- sponse 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. Hezbol- lah has since received large shipments of rockets and drones from Iran and produced its own weapons. It has air defence capabilities. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Sunday that the last diplomatic chance to avert a wider war was to push Hez- bollah forces away from Israeli terri- tory as stipulated by the 18-year-old UN Security Council measure that end- ed 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 UN force, from an area be- tween the temporarily negotiated bor- der, the Blue Line, and Lebanon’s Litani River, which runs roughly parallel to the frontier about 30 kilometres north. An Israeli official familiar with in- ternal 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.” — The Washington Post HEIDI LEVINE, RACHEL PANNETT, NIHA MASIH, KAREEM FAHIM, JEN- NIFER HASSAN, STEVE HENDRIX Follows rocket strikes on Golan Heights that killed 12 people, raising fears of all-out war HUSSEIN MALLA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Hezbollah fighters carry the coffin of a comrade who was killed Saturday by an Israeli airstrike in south Lebanon, during a funeral procession in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday. LEO CORREA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Druze clergymen attend funeral for some of the 12 children and teens killed in a rocket strike at a soccer field at the village of Majdal Shams,in Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, Sunday. WILL YOU JOIN OUR MENTORING MOVEMENT? ...and begin your rewarding new journey today! Help us enable life-changing mentoring relationships to ignite the power and potential of young people in Winnipeg! BigWinnipeg.com ;