• 11 people were killed and 19 injured in occupied Golan Heights, the most ever in a single day in north Israeli territories.
• The drums of war are beating, with Israel accusing Hezbollah of the attack when Hezbollah denies it.
Eleven people have died and 19 have been injured after a rocket attack on a football pitch in the Israeli-occupied regions of the Golan Heights. The IDF blamed Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed faction in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah spokesperson Mohamad Atif has, however, denied the accusation and denied ‘any relation to the Masjid Shams incident’. In a rare statement, the Lebanese government said it ‘condemns all acts of violence and aggression against all civilians and calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities on all fronts.’ The rare statement issued by the Lebanese government outlines the magnitude of the situation.
Israel’s response so far
There has been widespread anger among Israeli politicians after the attack. Prime Minister Netanyahu cut his stay in the US short to return to Israel as a response to this incident. Netanyahu told a leader of the Druze community who lives in the Golan Heights that ‘Hezbollah will pay a heavy price, the kind it has thus far not paid’. Israeli foreign minister Smotrich, someone who had said in the past that nuclear weapons on Gaza ‘was an option’, said ‘we are facing an all-out war’ while Israeli president Isaac Herzog had said ‘the state of Israel will firmly defend its citizens in its sovereignty.’
All in all, the rhetoric by these major Israeli government figures outlines a real risk of an all-out conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, one that could lead to more deaths than the ongoing genocide in Gaza and one that could spring the region into a regional conflict between Hezbollah, Iranian proxies in Syria, and Iraq against Israel. Hezbollah has dissociated itself from the recent attack by denying involvement, and earlier this month, Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, said, “If there is a cease-fire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion”. This means Hezbollah has been and is willing to completely stop all escalation and attacks against Israel if Israel were to implement a ceasefire deal in Gaza. A regional conflict does not benefit Hezbollah, as it would mean the group’s existence would be under threat. The US has also tried to cool tensions and even prevented Israel from launching a pre-emptive full-scale conflict against Hezbollah in the days after October 7. The fact is, no party wants a full-on war because of the cataclysmic consequences it could bring; however, Israel may well be an exception. Israel has time and again escalated the situation in the Middle East with Iran and Hezbollah. In June, Israel killed Sami Taleb Abdullah, the 55-year-old head of Hezbollah’s southeastern district. Earlier this month, Israel also killed a senior Hezbollah commander, Mohammed Nimah Nasser. On the Israeli side, not a single commander or senior political or military figure has been killed by Hezbollah, and the number of soldiers killed dwarfs that of Hezbollah’s losses in southern Lebanon. If Israel wanted to prevent a regional conflict, it could have avoided targeting senior Hezbollah figures to prevent escalation and could have accepted a ceasefire for its genocide in Gaza a long time ago but chose not to. For Israel, an invasion of Hezbollah gives them an excuse to expand their territory into southern Lebanon once again.
The attack overshadows Israel’s atrocities in Gaza
Earlier today, an attack on a Gaza school where displaced Gazan civilians were sheltering killed 31 people. This is far more than the deaths on the football pitch in the occupied Golan Heights. This atrocity has become overshadowed by the deaths in Israeli-occupied Golan. In fact, most, if not all, of the victims of the attack in the Golan Heights were not Israeli but rather were of the Druze minority. A Shia-based Syrian population that has been residing in the Golan for decades and whose majority population does not consider themselves Israeli. Israel has spun the deaths of Syrians in the Golan in their favour and is using them to overshadow the other heinous crimes they are committing in Gaza while at the same time fulfilling their ambitions. The mainstream media has been quick to put the attack in Golan on their front pages, but for the school massacre that occurred on the same day, they reduced it to a sub-story at the maximum and were slow to report. This double standard continues to dehumanise the Palestinian people and make them seem less important. It is this that is one of the many recipes for genocide.
