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 Arab village in the Israeli-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 bomb shelter sat just steps away, now pockmarked by shrapnel, its entrance speckled with blood.
A siren warning of incoming rocket fire 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 Willy, 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 Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, he stayed where he was.
Twelve children, Druse Arab boys and girls ranging in age from 10 to 16, were killed by the blast, and dozens more were injured and taken to hospitals. Israel blamed the attack on Hezbollah — which denied responsibility — and struck targets in Lebanon on Sunday, in what was seen as a restrained initial response. The Israeli military said the type of rocket used in the attack 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 attack, returned to the field the next day. The charred skeleton of his all-terrain vehicle lay outside the bomb shelter alongside blackened scooters and bicycles. Two of his cousins died 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 Willy, 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 black.
Ten of the children were buried in their family crypts in the town’s cemetery on Sunday morning. An eleventh was buried in Ein Qiniyye, one of the other three Druse villages in the Israeli-controlled Golan.
Israel 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 Israeli citizenship, remaining as permanent residents. Some still identify as Syrian, but after more than five decades of Israeli 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 had not yet been publicly named, his body apparently too ravaged to be identified.
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 black 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 bomb shelter, searching for the tiniest of human remains. 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 killed, he said, adding, “Let the army do the job.”
He and others called for the death 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, Israel’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 period when Hezbollah has been firing 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 killed 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 die in the grown-ups’ wars,” he added.
“The state has failed, the government has failed, 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 killed in the attack, in a narrow street just below the cemetery.
“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.
Source: nytimes.com
