Hezbollah ups the stakes of war

Fears of an imminent all-out war across Israel’s tense northern border with Lebanon are all too well-founded following the appalling weekend rocket attack by Iran’s Hezbollah terrorist proxies. Twelve boys and girls, some no more than 10, who were playing Saturday football in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, were killed. Even the UN, normally blinkered to the reality of Iranian skulduggery in the Middle East, was so moved by the atrocity that it warned on Sunday of the risk of the attack leading to “a wider conflict that would engulf the entire region in a catastrophe beyond belief”.

No less surprising, the government in Beirut, which is normally under the thumb of Hassan Nasrallah’s murderous terrorists, was appalled by the targeted slaughter of the young footballers at play. “Targeting civilians is a flagrant violation of international law and goes against the principles of humanity,” it declared.

The murder of the children, by a distinctively Iranian Falaq-1 rocket carrying a 50kg warhead, had thumbprints of Tehran’s ayatollahs all over what was the worst slaughter of Israelis since October 7 last year. The rocket is believed to have been launched from the village of Chebaa, in southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold. It struck the football field of Majdal Shams, a Druze village in the southern foothills of Mount Hermon near the Israel-Lebanon border. It coincided with a Hezbollah rocket assault on an Israeli military base 3km away.

The children were all members of the small but important Druze tribal and religious group that has been intensely loyal to Israel since it gained independence in 1948. An angry statement by Sheik Mowafaq Tarif, leader of the Druze community that makes up 1.5 per cent of Israel’s population, said the horrific massacre “crossed every possible red line”. His outrage is justified. It demands resonance and support from governments across the world, including our own. While ever ready to condemn Israel for perceived human rights abuses, too many critics are missing when it comes to atrocities by Tehran’s Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi terrorist proxies.

The attack has raised concerns about what could happen if Hezbollah launches a full-scale assault using its 150,000 mainly Iranian-supplied rockets, as Greg Sheridan writes. Since Hamas’s October 7 slaughter of 1200 Jews, Hezbollah has been waging a mainly low-level war against targets inside Israel, with a constant barrage of rocket fire against northern Israel towns and villages. This has displaced 80,000 Israelis from their homes. Retaliatory strikes by Israel against Hezbollah are believed to have killed about 450 people, many of them terrorists. Israel cannot tolerate the situation indefinitely. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was right to cut short his visit to Washington to hurry home to confront a situation that demands, as he said, that Hezbollah “pay a heavy price”.