Druze town buries 12th victim of Golan Heights rocket fire
Hundreds gathered Monday in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams for the funeral of the last of 12 youths killed by rocket fire.
Eleven-year-old Guevara Ibrahim was initially reported missing after Saturday's strike that hit a football pitch in the Druze Arab town, but has later been confirmed dead.
The 11 others killed in the attack, blamed by Israel and the U.S. on Lebanon's Hezbollah, were all aged 10 to 16 and laid to rest in ceremonies on Sunday.
An AFP photographer in Majdal Shams said more than 1,000 people, mostly members of the Druze community, had arrived for Ibrahim's funeral on Monday.
The Israeli military called the rocket strike "the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians" since the October 7 attack by Palestinian militants that triggered the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
Many residents of Majdal Shams however have not accepted Israeli nationality since Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967.
Following the conquest of about two-thirds of the Golan plateau during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel in 1981 annexed the area in a move not recognized by the international community, with the exception of the United States since 2019.
The Golan Druze largely identify as Syrian while having resident status, rather than citizenship, in Israel.
According to the Israeli military, Majdal Shams was hit Saturday with an Iranian-made rocket carrying a 50-kilogram warhead.
Hezbollah, which has traded regular cross-border fire with Israeli forces since the Gaza war began in early October, has denied responsibility for the strike, though it claimed multiple attacks on Israeli military positions that day.
Hezbollah says its actions against Israeli forces are in support of Palestinians in Gaza and its ally, militant group Hamas.
The violence on the Israel-Lebanon border has killed at least 527 people on the Lebanese side, according to an AFP tally.
Most of the dead have been fighters, but the toll includes at least 104 civilians.
On the Israeli side, including on the annexed Golan Heights, 22 soldiers and 24 civilians have been killed according to Israel's army.
Source: Agence France Presse
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