The funeral lament rang out across Majdal Shams, from the centre of the town, from balconies and from rooftops. Thousands of mourners packed the narrow streets and squares, carrying small coffins covered in white shrouds to their final resting place.
Men from the town in the occupied Golan Heights, some wearing traditional white hats topped with red, linked arms and sung a mourners’ chant. “The mother cries: ‘Where is my son? Don’t say he is among the victims,’” they intoned. “Oh, children, tears are pouring from the eyes of girls and young men.”
Less than a day earlier, the town of squat white-painted houses and fruit trees in the occupied Golan Heights became a flashpoint in an increasingly volatile regional conflict when a rocket struck the town in the late afternoon, killing 12 children who had gathered to play football.
“We heard the siren and the strike was immediate. Our house shook from the impact,” said Tawfiq Sayed Ahmed, an insurance agent in Majdal Shams.
Ahmed immediately thought of her three daughters, who loved to play at the football pitch, particularly on a warm weekend afternoon when it was packed with visitors. The children, she said, had split into teams for a match.
“I went to the stadium immediately and the scene I saw was indescribable; I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. The remains of children, dismembered. It was frightening, terrifying,” she said.
The town is populated by members of the Druze sect and lies in a part of the mountainous area that was militarily occupied and later annexed by Israel. The residents of Majdal Shams have grown familiar with grief: it is known for a remote hill that some used to shout to their family members in Syria on the other side of the valley.
Even so, Saturday’s strike, which Israeli and US officials blamed on the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, marked the gravest increase in tensions since the militia escalated rocket attacks last October in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Hezbollah denies responsibility for the attack, and instead blamed a stray projectile from Israel’s Iron Dome missile system.
Alma Ayman Fakher Eldin, the daughter of one of Ahmed’s friends, was killed in the strike. Relatives of another child, Guevara Ibrahim, have been searching for him in local hospitals and surrounding areas after he went to the football field at the time of the strike.
“She was just playing there,” said Ahmed of 13-year Alma. “She was like an angel, beautiful as sunlight. What did this girl do to deserve this horrific death?”
The entire town of Majdal Shams, she said, was “in a state of extreme shock. No one can comprehend what has happened. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Other residents took an opportunity to vent their anger at Israeli politicians who visited Majdal Shams, outraged at what they said was a lack of protection from the government against rocket attacks.
Some residents shouted at the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who in the hours after the strike declared: “Lebanon as a whole has to pay the price.”
“[Itamar] Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are the culprits here,” they yelled, accusing the ultranationalist security minister and finance minister of stoking further tensions.
Other residents of the town told reporters they simply wanted space to grieve, fearful of further attacks that could be wrought by an escalation.
Ahmed said the town wanted an end to the suffering. “We don’t want tragedies like this to happen to children, not here in the north, in the south, in Gaza or anywhere else. We do not want a single child to be killed. Enough killing of children, enough wasting of blood.”
