MAJDAL SHAMS — Seething anger and profound grief were on display at this Druze town on the Golan Heights, where thousands gathered for the funerals of 10 of the 12 children killed when a rocket from Lebanon hit a soccer field.
An 11th victim was buried in the nearby town of Ein Keinya, while a 12th, a teenage boy, was missing and presumed to have died in the attack.
Black flags flew on the lampposts of Majdal Shams and the surrounding Druze villages – Buq’ata and Masa’ada – and all the local businesses were shuttered for the funerals.
Thousands of locals and visitors from beyond the Golan, most wearing black, filled the town center as the victims’ white coffins were being prepared to be taken to the cemetery overlooking the center.
At the funeral, the families of the victims stood almost motionless and mostly silent, projecting an image of resilience and restraint that is typical of Druze, a Middle Eastern religious minority known for its distinct traditions, as well as the military prowess of its men.
“Any country interested in surviving cannot afford to allow its citizens and residents to be targeted over an extended period of time. We can’t rely on luck alone,” Mowafaq Tarif, a spiritual leader of the Druze community in Israel, said at the ceremony. Multiple officials attended it, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Education Minister Yoav Kisch as well as Opposition Leader Yair Lapid.
After the event, others spoke less reservedly.
“Lebanon should burn for this,” shouted Samir Halabi, a 52-year-old radio host from Majdal Shams, as he delivered an impromptu and impassioned speech on the soccer field, several yards away from where the rocket struck.
“The response should be 10 times the magnitude, they should be obliterated,” one local man, Zaki Amr, 29, said of Hezbollah, which has denied involvement in the incident. Israel and others say it perpetrated the attack, noting that the rocket that hit was a Falaq-1 Iranian-made weapon with a 50-kilogram warhead that, it is believed, Hezbollah alone of the terrorist groups in Lebanon possesses.
Several other locals shared Halabi’s bellicose approach but others were too shocked and emotionally devastated to talk politics. One young man tried unsuccessfully to express himself during an encounter with The Times of Israel. “I don’t know what to say, truly. I’m sorry,” he finally said, tears running down his face, as he embraced a young woman outside the cemetery.
Some, including Halabi, accused Israeli authorities of not doing enough to protect Majdal Shams. At least one person at the funeral blamed Israel directly for the worst tragedy in the recent history of Majdal Shams.
“I don’t think the rocket came from Lebanon. I think Israel sent it so we are also a part of their war,” said Nay Ibrahim, a 16-year-old high school student whose brother, Ajun, was wounded in the strike and whose cousin Johnny Wadiah Ibrahim, 13, was killed in it.
Ibrahim is from Masa’ada, a village slightly south of Majdal Shams. Her grandparents live in Majdal Shams and the family was at their home for a weekend gathering when her brother and cousin went to play soccer. “I got off the phone with my brother, told him to not be late to grandma’s. Then the explosion happened,” she recalled, crying quietly as two of her friends put their hands on her shoulder.
A unique relationship
The Druze of the Golan have had a different relationship with Israel than their coreligionists from the rest of the country.
The Golan came under Israeli control when Israel took it from Syria in 1967. Amid frequent talk of returning the land to Syria in the framework of a peace accord, its Druze inhabitants have largely refused to become Israeli citizens because, they said, they regarded themselves as Syrian citizens under occupation.
Whereas complaints of neglect and discrimination by Israeli authorities and in society are not uncommon among Druze from the rest of Israel, many of those Druze are outspoken advocates of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and proud Israeli citizens, boasting high rates of volunteering by men to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
After the funeral, hundreds of people from the neighboring Druze villages in the north stopped by the place where the rocket hit, some with their small children. They watched with anguished expressions the charred and twisted wreckage of a small ATV for children and several electric scooters scattered around the crater that the rocket created.
The crater, a white hole in the turf grass at the age of the children’s court, is adjacent to a shelter that the municipality put there just last week, said Amr, who was one of the first responders when the rocket hit Saturday. “The tragedy was that the rocket hit the people as they were running to the shelter,” he said.
Amr said he “worked like a robot, carrying bodies and wounded children to the side for evacuation” and used his limited first-aid skills to treat the wounded.
His first emotional response was anger at Hezbollah, he said. “After I was done treating people, I clenched my fists, red with the victims’ blood, with uncontrollable anger,” he recalled.
Amr said he saw one father running around the court in great distress calling the name of his son, who later turned out to be among the victims. One of the presumed victims, Jifara Ibrahim Ibrahim, is missing. Some believe the rocket hit him directly, obliterating his body. Some body parts were being discovered around the soccer field even as the funerals were being held.
Amr’s wife, Hizna, said the incident has caused her to reassess the decision to start a family in Majdal Shams, where Zaki was born. “Look, we’re exposed here. We’re abandoned. It took an hour for the ambulances to come. I don’t know if it’s where I want to raise a family,” said Hizna, who married Zaki last year and is originally from Beit Jan in the Lower Galilee.
The couple dismissed the anti-Israel sentiment expressed by Nay Ibrahim.
“This is just anger talking,” Hizna said. “We feel the pain of our Jewish brothers and sisters. We see the newspaper headlines, framed in black as this is a national tragedy. We are united, especially when we are still cleaning the blood of Druze children slaughtered by those animals for the crime of playing soccer on a Saturday night.”
