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Israel Media: Nine People Killed as Rocket Hits Football Pitch in Israeli-Occupied Golan

Israeli security forces and medics transport casualties from a site where a reported strike from Lebanon fell in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 27, 2024. (AFP)
Israeli security forces and medics transport casualties from a site where a reported strike from Lebanon fell in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 27, 2024. (AFP)
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Israel Media: Nine People Killed as Rocket Hits Football Pitch in Israeli-Occupied Golan

Israeli security forces and medics transport casualties from a site where a reported strike from Lebanon fell in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 27, 2024. (AFP)
Israeli security forces and medics transport casualties from a site where a reported strike from Lebanon fell in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 27, 2024. (AFP)

Nine people were killed in a rocket attack on a football ground in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday, Israeli Channel 13 reported, amid an escalation of fire between Israel and armed groups in Lebanon.

The Israeli emergency service said earlier that nine people were critically wounded by a rocket fired from Lebanon that hit a village football pitch in the Druze village of Majdal Shams. A medic described great destruction and fire at the scene.

The attack on the soccer pitch followed an Israeli strike in Lebanon that killed four fighters on Saturday. Two security sources in Lebanon said the four fighters killed in the Israeli strike on Kfar Kila in southern Lebanon were members of different armed groups, with at least one of them belonging to Hezbollah.

The Israeli military said its aircraft had targeted a military structure belonging to Hezbollah, after identifying a militant cell entering the building.

Hezbollah claimed at least four attacks, including with Katyusha rockets, in retaliation for the Kfarkila attacks.

However senior Hezbollah media representative Mohammad Afif denied responsibility for the strike on Majdal Shams.

Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel have been trading fire since October, after Hamas' attack on southern Israel triggered the Gaza war, in their worst escalation since 2006.

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An Israeli Strike that Killed 3 Lebanese Journalists Was Most Likely Deliberate

A destroyed journalists car is seen at the site where an Israeli airstrike hit a compound housing journalists, killing three media staffers from two different news agencies according to Lebanon's state-run National News Agency, in Hasbaya village, southeast Lebanon, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. (AP)
A destroyed journalists car is seen at the site where an Israeli airstrike hit a compound housing journalists, killing three media staffers from two different news agencies according to Lebanon's state-run National News Agency, in Hasbaya village, southeast Lebanon, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. (AP)
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An Israeli Strike that Killed 3 Lebanese Journalists Was Most Likely Deliberate

A destroyed journalists car is seen at the site where an Israeli airstrike hit a compound housing journalists, killing three media staffers from two different news agencies according to Lebanon's state-run National News Agency, in Hasbaya village, southeast Lebanon, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. (AP)
A destroyed journalists car is seen at the site where an Israeli airstrike hit a compound housing journalists, killing three media staffers from two different news agencies according to Lebanon's state-run National News Agency, in Hasbaya village, southeast Lebanon, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. (AP)

An Israeli airstrike that killed three journalists and wounded others in Lebanon last month was most likely a deliberate attack on civilians and an apparent war crime, an international human rights group said Monday.
The Oct. 25 airstrike killed three journalists as they slept at a guesthouse in southeast Lebanon in one of the deadliest attacks on the media since the Israel-Hezbollah war began 13 months ago.
Eleven other journalists have been killed and eight wounded since then, Lebanon's Health Minister Firass Abiad said.
More than 3,500 people have been killed in Lebanon, and women and children accounted for more than 900 of the dead, according to the Health Ministry. More than 1 million people have been displaced since Israeli ground troops invaded while Hezbollah has been firing thousands of rockets, drones and missiles into Israel - and drawing fierce Israeli retaliatory strikes.
Human Rights Watch determined that Israeli forces carried out the Oct. 25 attack using an air-dropped bomb equipped with a US produced Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, guidance kit.
The group said the US government should suspend weapons transfers to Israel because of the military´s repeated "unlawful attacks on civilians, for which US officials may be complicit in war crimes."
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the report.
The Biden administration said in May that Israel’s use of US-provided weapons in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law but that wartime conditions prevented US officials from determining that for certain in specific airstrikes.
The journalists killed in the airstrike in the southeastern town of Hasbaya were camera operator Ghassan Najjar and broadcast technician Mohammed Rida of the Beirut-based pan-Arab Al-Mayadeen TV, and camera operator Wissam Qassim, who worked for Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV.
Human Rights Watch said a munition struck the single-story building and detonated upon hitting the floor.
"Israel’s use of US arms to unlawfully attack and kill journalists away from any military target is a terrible mark on the United States as well as Israel," said Richard Weir, the senior crisis, conflict and arms researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Weir added that "the Israeli military’s previous deadly attacks on journalists without any consequences give little hope for accountability in this or future violations against the media."
Human Rights Watch said that it found remnants at the site and reviewed photographs of pieces collected by the resort owner and determined that they were consistent with a JDAM guidance kit assembled and sold by the US company Boeing.

The JDAM is affixed to air-dropped bombs and allows them to be guided to a target by using satellite coordinates, making the weapon accurate to within several meters, the group said.
In November 2023, two journalists for Al-Mayadeen TV were killed in a drone strike at their reporting spot. A month earlier, Israeli shelling in southern Lebanon killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and seriously wounded other journalists from France´s international news agency Agence France-Presse and Qatar´s Al-Jazeera TV on a hilltop not far from the Israeli border.