The Israeli government said on Sunday that it would “hit the enemy hard”, the day after a shelling that killed at least 12 children and youths in a village in the annexed Golan Heights, attributed to the Lebanese Hezbollah, as concerns intensified that the entire area would be set on fire. Middle East amid the war in the Gaza Strip.

Iran has warned Israel against the “consequences” of a full-scale retaliatory strike on Lebanon. Any new “adventure” by Israel could “lead to an aggravation” of the “war in the region”, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said.

According to Israeli authorities, on Saturday a rocket fired from Lebanon hit a soccer field in the village of Majdal Shams, killing 12 boys and girls, aged between ten and sixteen, and injuring around thirty other people. The police announced that an eleven-year-old boy is missing.

The White House blamed the Iranian-backed Lebanese Islamist movement for the “horrific” attack. “It was his own rocket, launched from an area under his control,” he said in a press release signed by the spokeswoman for the National Security Council of the US presidency, Adrienne Watson.

An Iranian Falak-type rocket was used, with a warhead containing 53 kilograms of explosives, according to Israeli authorities.

Hezbollah — which denied it was of its own making — is the only force in the region that has this type of rocket in its arsenal, Israel’s foreign ministry said, accusing the Lebanese movement of “crossing all red lines” by opening fire. against civilians”, and indeed “deliberately”.

Hezbollah will pay “dearly”, threatened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who returned yesterday Sunday from the USA.

Last night his government’s security council authorized him and Defense Minister Yoav Gallad to “decide on the manner and timing of retaliation against the terrorist organization Hezbollah,” the prime minister’s services announced, without further details.

The rocket launch came shortly after news broke that four Hezbollah fighters had been killed in an Israeli bombardment in southern Lebanon. Last night, the movement said it had fired rockets at military positions in the Golan, including Falak, before denying responsibility for the strike in Majdal Shams.

The small Druze community is located in the Golan Heights, an area of ​​strategic importance on the trilateral border of Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Two-thirds of the plateau was occupied by the Israeli army during the 1967 war, before it was annexed in 1981.

The international community has never recognized the annexation of occupied Syrian territory.

Israel’s defense minister went to the stadium in Majdal Shams yesterday, where he “insisted” that Israel would “hit the enemy hard”, according to his services.

Thousands of people gathered in the community for the funerals of the victims, including women wearing black mourning dresses and white headscarves in front of the coffins.

It is “the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians since October 7,” said Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, referring to the Hamas raid on southern sectors of Israeli territory that sparked the Gaza war.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “condemned” the attack and called on “all parties to exercise maximum restraint”.

EU foreign policy chief Giuseppe Borrell called for an “independent international inquiry”, Berlin appealed for “calm”, London expressed concern over the threatened “escalation”. French President Emmanuel Macron told Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday that his country is “fully committed to doing everything to prevent a new escalation in the region”, during their telephone conversation.

Lebanon called for an “international investigation” and warned that an Israeli attack on its territory could spark a regional flare-up. Egypt, which mediates with Qatar and the US in the indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, warned against the “dangers of opening a new front in Lebanon”.

Syria denounced Israel’s “false accusations” against Hezbollah.

“It could be a misfire, or an Israeli air defense missile fired to intercept a target in the air,” said Riyad Kawaji, director of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analyzes (INEGMA).

Since the day after the outbreak of the war in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, has been exchanging fire practically every day with the Israeli army on the border of the two states.

Yesterday Sunday, the movement hastily removed its members from positions in southern Lebanon after the Israeli threats, a source close to Hezbollah said.

The war in the Gaza Strip erupted on October 7 when Hamas’s military arm launched an unprecedented raid on southern Israel that killed 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people abducted that day, 111 are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip, but 39 are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military.

Large-scale operations by the Israeli armed forces have since claimed the lives of at least 39,324 people in the Palestinian enclave, also mostly civilians, according to the latest figures from the Hamas government’s health ministry.

Civil protection said yesterday that Israeli shelling hit tents in the Al Mawasi displaced persons camp, near Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, killing at least five people.

The Israeli army ordered residents of the communities of al-Burayj and al-Suhada, in the central part of the besieged enclave, to leave immediately, saying it would conduct operations “with force” there.

The commissioner-general of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, pointed out via X that “currently, only 14% of the territory of Gaza is not subject to ‘urgent evacuation orders'” of civilians, accusing Israeli army for causing “desolation and panic”.

After the failure of many months of efforts to secure through indirect negotiations a ceasefire that would have been accompanied by the release of Israeli hostages in the Palestinian enclave and in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli prisons, a meeting of representatives of the mediating capitals was to take place in Rome yesterday Sunday – Doha, Cairo, Washington—with Israel’s intelligence chief.