MAJDAL SHAMS, Israel — The mother of one of the twelve children murdered Saturday by a Hezbollah rocket cried out in grief as she approached the local soccer field where they were killed.
“Tell me,” the local schoolteacher asked, as the mother wept behind her, “how am I supposed to erase their names from the register?”
Nearby, the crater of the rocket sits at a corner of the field, near a torn steel fence.
Local resident Dolan Abu Saleh, who lives near the field and saw the rocket fly over the town before striking the soccer pitch, points out that the rocket struck a point near the entrance of the local bomb shelter — meaning that children who had scrambled to take cover as warning sirens sounded were killed on their way to safety.
One paramedic, he said, loaded the lifeless body of his own daughter onto an ambulance before returning to treat the wounded.
Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News
Shrapnel hit the playground nearby; body parts were found on the roof of a neighboring building. The scene, even three days later, is almost too much for journalists to bear.
Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart NewsThe streets are lined with black flags. Portraits of the victims hang on fences; a memorial, with a soccer ball or basketball placed in each of twelve empty chairs, along with jerseys featuring the names of the children, takes up the central roundabout.
Local dignitaries arrive to comfort the village and the grieving families. Former defense minister Moshe “Bogey” Ya’alon; the mayor of the town of Karmiel; an imam from the Muslim community in the central Israeli town of Lydda.
The imam delivers a speech in Arabic calling for unity among all of Israel’s citizens — Druze, Muslim, Jewish, and Chrisitian. He leads Muslims in the midday prayer at the memorial site and embraces members of the community.
As they deliver eulogies, the message echoes from one leader to another: we must unite, as one nation, against hate.
Some foreign journalists ask locals for their views about how Israel should respond. But local resident Jawad Abuzed has no interest in geopolitics. For the Druze, spread across Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, there really is only one answer.
“We hope these 12 kids will be ambassadors of peace,” Abuzed tells me.
“And we ask for peace all over the world.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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