The international community has appealed to Tel Aviv not to escalate tensions in the region after Israel’s security cabinet authorized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to decide how the nation should respond to a fatal strike that killed 12 youngsters in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

Israeli officials and Lebanon-based Hezbollah group have accused each other of launching a rocket attack on July 27 that claimed 12 young lives and injured dozens in a soccer field in the predominantly Druze community in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights.

The tragedy has prompted Lebanon's caretaker foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, to demand an international investigation into the incident. The latest developments have also prompted Norway and Ireland to issue warnings for their citizens to leave Lebanon, and while some flights were either cancelled or suspended.

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Haydar Oruc, a former researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Turkiye, noted that the Druze people in Golan Heights, who are not Israeli citizens, find themselves caught up in the violence in the region. “It is considered to be part of Israel's attempt to draw the US into the field,” Oruc told China Daily.

Because it “seems impossible for Israel, which cannot even defeat Hamas, to confront Hezbollah on its own”, Israel, by fostering the perception that it is under attack, aims to create a situation whereby the US “will be forced to intervene”, Oruc said.

“Despite the reluctance of the US and other countries in the region, it is expected that the Israeli administration will continue to play such games, and all countries, especially the US, should be prepared for such Israeli games,” said Oruc.

The Golan Heights is Syrian territory occupied by Israel in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Israel captured it in the Six-Day War in 1967, and annexed the territory in 1981. The Druze community in Israel is recognized as a separate religious entity whose culture is mostly Arab, and their language is Arabic, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.

The Syrian foreign ministry has accused Israel of the “brutal massacre” in Majdal Shams, stressing that holding Hezbollah responsible for the crime was “part of (Israel’s) blatant attempts to fabricate pretexts” to continue aggression on the region as a whole, Syria’s SANA News Agency reported.

Jordan’s foreign ministry has warned of “dangerous escalation” in southern Lebanon.

French President Emmanuel Macron has condemned in the strongest terms the rocket attacks in his phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, adding that France was fully committed to avoid a new escalation in the region, the Times of Israel reported.

United Kingdom Foreign Secretary David Lammy also condemned the strike in Golan Heights on his X account and said they were “deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation and destabilization”.  He said he and Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati both agreed that widening of conflict in the region “is in nobody’s interest”.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in a post on the social media platform X, claimed that a "Falaq-1 Iranian Rocket” manufactured in Iran with a diameter of 240 millimeters was used in the attack, saying that “Iran spends their money enabling their proxies to commit acts of terrorism against innocent civilians”.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also called for restraint and warned against escalating violence in the region.

Even though 2024 Summer Olympic Games go on in Paris, an Israeli strike on July 27 killed 30 Palestinians and injured more than 100 following the bombing of a field hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The hospital was located inside the Khadija School.

“Civilians, and children in particular, should not continue to bear the burden of the horrific violence plaguing the region,” said a spokesperson for Guterres.

The UN’s children agency UNICEF said on it X account that children “must always be protected”, as it mourned the “horrific and heartbreaking reports of several children killed in Majdal Shams as they played soccer when rockets reportedly hit”.

“The cycle of violence that is claiming the lives and futures of children must stop,” it demanded.

Also echoing the call was European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who condemned “this bloodbath” and “unacceptable incident”, as he called for utmost restraint.

In a press conference in Tokyo during a Japan visit, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on July 28 that Washington is determined to bring the Gaza conflict to a close.

“It’s gone on for far too long. It’s cost far too many lives.  We want to see Israelis, we want to see Palestinians, we want to see Lebanese live free from the threat of conflict and violence,” Blinken said.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei noted on his X account, as he formally endorsed Masoud Pezeshkian as Iran's ninth president that there was a time when the subject of Palestine was “solely a concern for Islamic countries”. But today, he said, the issue of Palestine and Gaza “have become a global public concern”.

“This issue has spread today from inside the US Congress to the UN and the Paris Olympics,” said Khamenei.

READ MORE: UN agency: Over 600,000 children in Gaza denied education amid war

Furkan Halit Yolcu, a researcher at Sakarya University Middle East Institute in Turkiye, said the prolonged Palestinian struggle to “merely survive on its inherited soil continues”, and that Israel has also been seeking “a piece of Lebanon” for decades.

“The atrocities and conflict during 1982 and thereafter show that Israel has its eyes on South Lebanon per its expansionist strategies,” Yolcu told China Daily.

He warned that if any major new conflict between Hezbollah and Israel starts, both parties will suffer huge losses involving “several dimensions”.

Contact the reporters at jan@chinadailyapac.com