Twelve Murdered Children—and a Middle East on the Brink

On Saturday evening a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 children on a soccer field in the town of Majdal Shams, on the Golan Heights in northern Israel.

For many months it has been said that Israel is “on the brink” of all-out war with Hezbollah. It’s been repeated so often that the phrase has lost its urgency. I wrote it myself here in January after spending time in the eerily depopulated swath of the country just north of my parents’ town, Nahariya, in easy rocket range near the Lebanon border.

But with the deaths of the children playing soccer—their mass funeral is underway as I write these lines—and the wounding of more than 30 others, “the brink” was either finally reached or actually crossed.

Most of the world’s attention since the Hamas terror attack of October 7 has been focused on Israel’s war in Gaza, now about to enter its eleventh month. But for Israelis the war has two fronts. 

Israel’s north has been pummeled by rocket fire from Hezbollah—the Iranian proxy army of Lebanese Shia fighters who began shooting in support of the Hamas offensive. Dozens of Israeli towns near the border were evacuated after October 7 and have stood empty since then—an unprecedented development in Israeli history. About 70,000 evacuees are still living in hotels and temporary quarters. Part of southern Lebanon has been depopulated by Israeli artillery and aircraft hunting down Hezbollah cells. 

But both Israel and Hezbollah have tried to contain the fighting to the vicinity of the border. When I spoke to an experienced observer earlier in the war, he predicted that an all-out war with Hezbollah would have about ten times the intensity of the one against Hamas, thanks to the Lebanese group’s superior weapons and training. Such a war would be devastating for Israel, even if it’s more devastating for Lebanon. Israel’s army is still engaged in Gaza and would be badly stretched if forced to handle two fronts at once. And the war could easily expand to include Iran itself.