Robert Inlakesh for Palestine Chronicle
While Zionist propagandists, and even the Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari, claimed that a missile that struck a football game in the village of Majdal Shams killed 12 Israeli children, this is a baldfaced lie.
Israel carried out a horrifying attack on a civilian-populated building in Southern Beirut, killing 7 and injuring 78, while also assassinating a Hezbollah official named Fouad Shoukr.
The Israeli justification for this massacre was that its citizens were attacked in a village called Majdal Shams, however, this allegation has no basis in fact or in law.
Majdal Shams is one of a handful of Syrian-Druze populated villages that fall inside the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which was illegally seized by force in 1967 and later annexed in 1981; a move that was rejected by the United Nations. The Golan Heights is internationally accepted as Syrian land, with the exception of Israel and the United States.
While Zionist propagandists, and even the Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari, claimed that a missile that struck a football (soccer) game in the village of Majdal Shams killed 12 Israeli children, this is a baldfaced lie.
According to the Majdal Shams Regional Council, none of the children killed in the blast were Israeli citizens, as the majority of the residents of the village refused to take citizenship from their occupier. Instead, they hold special Israeli IDs, similar to how Palestinians live in East Jerusalem with similarly functioning IDs.
In fact, Syrian-Druze who live in the Golan Heights were actually placed under Israeli military occupation between 1967 and 1981, many of whom were separated from relatives who live on the other side of the separation line, all of which are isolated from the wider Syrian-Druze community.
The people of Majdal Shams and the other local villages in the Golan Heights, overwhelmingly see themselves as Syrians, many of whom are loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and even support Hezbollah.
Illegal Occupier
Israel, as the illegal occupier of their lands, has seized over 95% of the Golan Heights territory, stealing its water resources and setting up projects to loot oil reserves that were discovered back in 2015.
While the Israeli regime has set up its own agricultural and green energy projects, it has done so at the expense of the indigenous Syrian population, pursuing projects to place wind energy turbines right next to villages.
In addition to this, the tens of thousands of local Syrian-Druze who live in the Golan Heights are being encircled by a growing population of illegal Israeli settlers, with the aim being to bring 100,000 Israeli Jewish settlers to the area in order to Judaize the territory.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Syrian-Druze have had their agricultural industry destroyed, as when Israel pumps water from underneath their land, they sell it back to the indigenous Syrians at a much higher price than Israeli settlers pay. These kinds of restrictions on the livelihoods of Syrians in their villages led to a series of revolts and civil disobedience, spearheaded by Majdal Shams.
Hezbollah Denies
Hezbollah had never targeted any of the Syrian-Druze villages throughout the past ten months of tit-for-tat actions against Israel. In fact, it had never even targeted Israeli Jewish settlements that are in much closer proximity to the Lebanese border with strikes intended to inflict civilian massacres, despite Israel having done this to Lebanese civilians in the south of Lebanon.
Hezbollah denied any involvement in the strike that killed 12 children and left dozens of others injured, yet the Israeli military immediately blamed them without presenting any proof.
For the people of Majdal Shams, it is also clear that many blamed Israel for the strike and believe that an errant Iron Dome Air-defense Missile caused the blast. Footage even surfaced to show that Iron Dome missiles had misfired and fell around the Syrian village.
Perhaps the most telling part of this story however, is the fact that when Israeli politicians attempted to visit the funerals of the slain Syrian children, the local population kicked them out and shouted them down, with one man stating that Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was there to ‘use the blood of our children’.
When it was announced that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was going to attend one of the funerals, a protest erupted in the village, during which Syrians held up signs reading ‘war criminal’.
Putting aside the details of which missile caused the horrifying massacre of children in Majdal Shams, this was not an attack against territory accepted by the United Nations as belonging to Israel, therefore it does not warrant the ‘response’ that we witnessed in the heart of southern Beirut.