Global leaders were engaged in intensive diplomacy on Sunday to dissuade Israel from increasing attacks on Lebanon, amid fears that a wider regional war could erupt in response to a rocket strike that killed 12 children playing football in the occupied Golan Heights.
As the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, convened a meeting of his national security cabinet, the White House backed Israeli statements that blamed Saturday’s attack on the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, saying: “It was their rocket, and launched from an area they control. It should be universally condemned.”
But the US was “also working on a diplomatic solution … that will end all attacks once and for all”, a statement from the White House’s national security council added.
Speaking in Tokyo, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was clear. “We also don’t want to see the conflict escalate. We don’t want to see it spread,” he said.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has also spoken to Netanyahu, telling him that France remained committed to doing “everything to avoid a new escalation in the region by passing messages to all parties involved in the conflict”, according to a statement from the Élysée Palace.
The UN’s special coordinator for Lebanon, as well as the UN peacekeeping force deployed along the line that demarcates Israeli from Lebanese territory, urged “maximum restraint”.
Both sides, they said, must “put a stop to the ongoing intensified exchanges of fire”. “It could ignite a wider conflagration that would engulf the entire region in a catastrophe beyond belief,” they added.
The diplomacy came amid growing anger in Israel over the strike on the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in 1967 and annexed from Syria in 1981.
On Sunday, thousands attended funeral processions for the 12 children, aged from 10 to 16, who were killed in the strike on the town’s football field. “Leave our children out of these wars,” sobbed one woman in the procession, Agence France-Presse reported.
Vowing revenge and promising that Hezbollah would be made to “pay a heavy price”, Netanyahu returned early from a visit to the US, travelling immediately to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters in Tel Aviv. Israeli jets struck southern Lebanon overnight.
Then on Sunday afternoon, Netanyahu convened a meeting with the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with the director general of the defence ministry and the heads of the Mossad, Shin Bet and military intelligence services, to weigh Israel’s response.
After the meeting, Netanyahu’s office said the security cabinet had authorised the prime minister and defence minister to determine the “type” and “timing” of Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s attack.
The possibility of a larger Israeli strike on Lebanon, beyond airstrikes across the south of the country that have drawn concern from allies for months, has raised fears of a wider regional war beyond Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Israeli officials and army chiefs said Hezbollah was responsible for the rocket attack. The IDF published images of shrapnel that it said showed the deployment of an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket.
Hezbollah has denied responsibility, although it did say it was behind a volley of rocket fire that it said was intended for Israeli military targets in the occupied Golan Heights earlier the same day. Instead, the Iran-backed organisation said, a falling projectile from Israel’s Iron Dome missile system was responsible.
US envoy Amos Hochstein, who has spearheaded negotiations, spoke to the Lebanese prime minister, Nagib Mikati, the house speaker, Nabih Berry, and the influential Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt in an effort to calm tensions in the hours after the strike.
The talks followed fiery statements from Israeli politicians, including the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who said “all of Lebanon must pay the price” for the attack.
The tensions came as mediators, including the head of the CIA, William Burns, David Barnea of the Mossad as well as Qatari and Egyptian officials, met in Rome in the hopes of securing a ceasefire in Gaza, along with the return of Israeli hostages held there by Hamas.
Hezbollah’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, has previously said the group would stop its attacks on Israel’s northern border area if an agreement was reached to halt the fighting in Gaza, which has killed more than 39,000 people since Israel began its assault last October.
In a statement following Barnea’s return from the talks, the Israeli government said that mediators discussed new requests submitted by their side, which reportedly include refusing the return of militants to northern Gaza and a long-term presence at the territory’s southern border with Egypt. The talks, which have dragged on for months, are expected to continue.
Hezbollah, along with other militias in southern Lebanon, has intensified attacks aimed at Israeli military installations in recent months, in retaliation for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In response, Israel has conducted airstrikes deep into Lebanese territory, while Israeli jets frequently break the sound barrier over the capital, Beirut. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the cross-border fire on either side.
Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, had told Reuters that his government had asked the US to ask Israel to show restraint after the attack on the occupied Golan Heights. US officials, he added, had requested that Lebanon’s government pass a message to Hezbollah to also show restraint.
Lebanon’s national carrier, Middle East Airlines, said it had delayed some flights from Sunday night to Monday morning.
A source close to Hezbollah told AFP that the group had evacuated positions in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley “that it thinks could be a target for Israel”.
Towns in northern Israel, beyond communities near the border with Lebanon that were evacuated in recent months, remained on high alert. The University of Haifa told staff who work above the fifth floor of a large 30-storey tower on the campus to work from home.
