Mourning the Children Killed in Majdal Shams

Milar Shaar, 10, was a sweet boy with a round face who treated everyone respectfully and excelled academically.

In the living room of his home in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights sit two trophies for being his class’s top pupil. Milar adored Marvel characters and slept with a stuffed Spider-Man. He wrote “I love you” notes to his mother. He dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player. When his teacher gave each child a white T-shirt to decorate before the 2022 World Cup, Milar went all-Lionel Messi, painting the soccer star’s name in English, his No. 10 within a heart, and a uniformed Messi at play. The extended family watched Argentina’s World Cup victory on television at Milar’s grandmother’s house, the boy wearing a Messi jersey to cheer on his hero.

“He was jumping. He was smiling,” said his cousin Ivan Ibraheem. “It was one of the best days for Milar.”

Soccer, and war, ended Milar’s life on Saturday evening, July 27. The family was at a barbecue, and Milar wanted to leave for practice. His mother, Lena, refused. Milar persisted. His sister drove him home to change from the purple Emirates jersey and shorts he wore into his local team’s uniform, and on to the field.

Practice began at 6 p.m. At 6:18, an Iranian-produced Falaq rocket shot from Lebanon by Hezbollah struck the field. It killed 12 children ages 10–16, all Druze. Eleven of the 12 lived in Majdal Shams.

Mayar Shufi, who is dating Milar’s sister, rushed from the barbecue to a clinic to which several of the gravely wounded people—all children but for their coach—were taken. In one room, Shufi saw two boys and two girls dead, some missing limbs. He entered another room and found Milar, intact but barely alive, his body punctured by shrapnel.

He held the boy’s hand. “Milar, don’t be scared,” he said.

“He opened his eyes and looked at me,” Shufi told me. “He took a deep breath, and I knew he died.”

Ibraheem and Shufi spoke with me last Thursday morning at an outdoor ground-floor parking area cleared of cars. It’s where the Shaar family received visitors, men and women sitting on plastic chairs on opposite sides of a wooden divider. Above was the building housing the clinic where Milar died.

He lived two buildings away.

Black flags of mourning fly everywhere in Majdal Shams, a town of 12,000 people built into Mt. Hermon and populated almost entirely by Druze, a sect that broke from Islam a millennium ago. Three traffic circles display posters of the names and faces of the 12 murdered children. In one circle, jerseys with the children’s names in English are draped atop 12 plastic chairs. Black strings secure soccer balls on 10 of the chairs; on the others were basketballs, the preferred sport of Alma Aldein, 11, and Ezel Ayoub, 12, two of the three girls murdered.

Unseen anywhere are Israeli or Syrian flags. The situation is complicated. Syria’s defeat in 1967’s Six-Day War brought the Golan Heights under Israeli sovereignty, and Druze attained the right to citizenship—but most opt not to become Israeli citizens and are stateless, preferring “permanent resident” status and going abroad with Israeli travel documents rather than passports. Some volunteer to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, whereas Druze in the rest of Israel, who are citizens, are drafted.

The best way to explain the distinction might be that Druze in the Galilee are Israeli, and often patriotic; Druze in the Golan Heights are not anti-Israel, but consider themselves Syrian.

Whatever their location, Druze are a tribal people. Teens and young adults are as committed to Druze peoplehood as are their elders. Leaving the group or intermarrying is almost unheard of. Druze people who say that they’re all family, as some did during my two-day visit last week, often mean it literally.

A woman I met at the field, Samya Ibraheem, didn’t know any of the victims, but said, “They’re all my kids.” Her subdued tones rendered her voice nearly inaudible. She lives just down the street from the field and was at home when the missile struck. But only now, five days later, could she bring herself to visit. She approached a barrier, held it, and looked at the victims’ faces on a poster. She left after less than five minutes.

Samya Ibraheem appeared in black slacks and a black sleeveless blouse. Nearly everyone I encountered wore black. A white sash looped around one’s neck and hanging down toward the belt signified the closest relatives of the victims, someone explained.

Multiple white sashes were visible at the beit ha’am (people’s building) in the center of town, where bereaved families gathered as one unit each afternoon during the week of mourning between 4 and 7 p.m. to receive people coming to comfort them. Some of the visitors there and at the mourners’ homes were Jews who’d traveled from throughout Israel.

One was Simcha Rothman, a member of Knesset from the Religious Zionism party, who visited several of the bereaved families. “This tragedy, involving children, touched everyone’s heart—children playing soccer,” he said. “The entire town was struck because everyone is one big family. It’s something Jews and Druze share as small ethnic groups.”

At two houses of mourning, the extended families drew me in, urging me to stay longer to listen to their stories, to speak to more relatives, to see their child’s room. Begging off invitations to stay for lunch was fruitless. Declining would be insulting, someone said. I accepted.

That didn’t occur at a third house of mourning, because the family soon had to leave for the daily gathering at the beit ha’am. But it was there that I lucked into witnessing a third, and most poignant, form of the community’s comforting customs: mourners coming en masse to comfort another bereaved family.

It occurred in the nearby village of Ein Kinye, where one of the 12 children lived: Nazem Saab, 15. More than 50 men from nearly all of the 11 other families, including fathers of the dead children, drove over from Majdal Shams. They assembled in a line down the sloped street beside the Saabs’ home. Nazem’s parents, Faher and Mona, and relatives lined up opposite them. The first group uttered a scripted greeting, similar to what I’d seen at the two other homes: “We feel your pain. Your son is like our son. We all lost him.” The family’s response went something like this: “Thank you. We hope you don’t endure what we’re enduring.”

The visit “helps me, it strengthens me,” Faher Saab told me after the delegation departed. He was called away before he could say more about his late son other than that they’d spent time together in the family’s side business of growing and selling plums, and that Nazer dreamed of a career in engineering.

Faher’s brother Rawnak said his nephew was quiet and friendly, always helping teachers and classmates, and doing a lot for his 17-year-old brother with special needs. “We didn’t know he had so many friends until they came to comfort us,” he said. “Everything in life starts small and grows, just like people. Except for grief. It starts big and gradually lessens.”

In Majdal Shams, signs appear in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and many people speak all three languages. Its streets are hilly, its homes and shops attractive, its residents high-achieving professionals and businesspeople. Much of its economy depends on tourism, almost nonexistent throughout northern Israel since Hezbollah, which controls much of southern Lebanon and is a party in the country’s government, began attacking the day after Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of the Negev. Unlike communities in the Galilee and northern Golan Heights whose residents Israel evacuated, Druze have stayed put in Majdal Shams and the Golan’s three other Druze villages: Buqata (pop. 7,000), Mas’ada (pop. 4,000), and Ein Kinye (pop. 2,800). Druze don’t abandon their land, people explained.

Risk endures. The head of Majdal Shams’ town council, Dolan Abu Saleh, estimated that two Israeli air-raid sirens, warning of incoming missiles or drones, have sounded each week since Hezbollah’s attacks began on Oct. 8.

Several Majdal Shams residents I asked question Israel’s claim, supported by the United States, that Hezbollah fired the fatal missile. It could have been Hezbollah, they said, but maybe not. Some wondered why Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome laser-guided interception system didn’t fire. One man suggested that Israel shot the rocket at Majdal Shams, but didn’t explain why it would’ve done that.

I asked Abu Saleh whether he doubts that Hezbollah is responsible.

“No, it was their missile that came from Shebaa,” a nearby Lebanese village, he said.

People seem to think the source of their pain is unimportant, because the tragedy can’t be undone. More than that, person after person told me, revenge is antithetical to the Druze.

“We don’t want to take revenge, because then, what—we’re going to kill children on the other side?” said Nadeem Welly, owner of an eponymous restaurant on the main street of Mas’ada.

Underlying their resignation is the fundamental Druze belief in fate. For reasons no one, certainly not the grieving families, can comprehend, God determined to take the 12 children at this time and in this manner, the explanation goes. At least outwardly, no one asks: Why me?

Milar wanted to attend practice, his mother pushed back, he prevailed—and he’s dead. Alma, Ezel, and Venes Al-Safadi, 11, played basketball that afternoon, bought ice cream, declined a request from Ezel’s grandmother, who lived across from the store, to stop in for a few minutes, continued to the field—and are dead. The detour would have saved the three girls’ lives.

Fate, however, can also save lives, said some residents. For instance:

I heard of two boys who left the field moments before the missile strike to get a snack.

Ehab Abu Jabar showed me a picture of his son Omry, 3. They were playing at the field, and would have stayed much longer, but left at 5:50 p.m. because Omry was hungry.

Entering the field together four nights after the attack, a man blurted out to me, motioning to his 9-year-old son, whose hand he held: “We were supposed to play here that afternoon, but he had an earache, so I took him to get it looked at.”

A social worker, Handa Ayoub, mentioned a father who pressed his son to go outside to play at the field rather than sit bored at home. The boy refused, the father noodged. The boy refused, the father noodged. The boy won out—and the father “now wants to give the son a prize for not listening to him,” said Ayoub, who volunteers at a mental health resiliency center established after the attack. “We wondered if anyone would come,” she said as the center closed at 9 p.m. on Wednesday. “Yesterday, maybe 100 people came.” Two were another father and his son, 16 or 17. Four of the son’s friends were murdered in the attack; the son would have been, too, but was delayed leaving and didn’t go to the field.

Ayoub said she often urges her 10-year-old daughter to go to the playground, the one filled with children frolicking that fateful moment, just 50 feet or so from where the missile landed. “Now, I won’t encourage her to play there. It’s overprotectiveness on my part. Now, every parent knows how to protect his child, knows the treasure in his hand, knows to keep him safe, so he won’t get hurt,” she said. “It’s a kind of compassion parents have for kids they didn’t have before.”

Along with fate, the Druze belief in reincarnation is powerful and provides comfort now. The Druze see a body as merely the soul’s repository—so much so that even after burying a child, a person never again visits the gravesite.

“That they’re living new lives inside the bodies of kids born now—this gives us strength and patience,” said Ameer Braik, an uncle of one victim, Hazem Abu Saleh, 15. Hazem’s cousin Fajr, 15, was murdered at the field, too.

“We believe that when a Druze child dies, he goes to other Druze parents,” said Ivan Ibraheem, Milar Shaar’s cousin. I asked whether he believes that Milar’s soul has already entered another family’s baby. “Yes,” he said. “I hope those parents treat him as well as we treated him.”

I related that quotation to a friend later that day, and choked on the words.

I had been to Majdal Shams before, most recently on New Year’s Day 2023. Along with friends visiting from Scotland on that cold and peaceful morning, I’d enjoyed hot drinks and pastries at Dam Caffe, overlooking a regulation-size soccer field adjacent to the smaller one where the Hezbollah rocket fell.

The café is closed now, its door handle twisted, its front glass pane—Coffee: Take a cup of kindness. Mix it well with love, it reads—shattered, four upstairs windows blown out next to where we’d sat, two air conditioners ripped. Bark was stripped off a branch of a tree next to the door. The explosion on the field caused this damage from about 75 yards away, just beyond one of the goals.

Closer in, the effects were far more severe. Standing near the opposite goal and pointing at an adjacent building, a firefighter related that body parts were blown into and on top of the structure. To a goalkeeper’s left and a few yards downfield was a shallow hole, the spot where the rocket landed, apparently pointing down. It tore the synthetic turf and mangled that section of fence enclosing the field. The resulting fire blackened the fence’s gray poles and wiring, and melted parts of the scooters and battery-powered bicycles that likely transported some of the murdered and wounded children to the field. It also shot millions of crushed-rubber pellets lying under the playing surface and past the fence. Farther along, one of several makeshift memorials decorated the fence and turf, black ribbons specking the wire and a dozen trophies with the victims’ images, a soccer ball behind and a plastic poppy before each trophy, standing upon the green sideline. Wreaths leaned onto a barrier, sent from far-off and nearby communities: Kibbutz Kfar Blum, Kibbutz Snir, Kibbutz Merom Golan, Kisra-Sumei (a Druze town in the Galilee), the Ramat Hanegev regional council, the UJA-Federation of New York. Mourning with you, brothers and sisters in arms, read a message on one wreath. We hurt your hurt, from the mayor and council of Raanana, said another. And: Druze and Jews are brothers.

At the field’s center mark, I happened to lock onto three spots: the missile’s impact point, a small side door near that corner, and, about 4 yards beyond the open door, a migunit: a mobile concrete room about the size of a tool shed, offering refuge from an enemy attack. Miguniot appear alongside some roads, intersections, and in other public places throughout the country as shelter for when a siren sounds.

A Majdal Shams worker had told me that three additional miguniot he’d ordered arrived on Monday, July 22. He’d placed one of them here, just outside the small side entrance to the soccer field. The firefighter had said that when the siren sounded that fatal afternoon, the coach, 21-year-old Aram Shker, ordered the children to run for the migunit. They had less than 10 seconds to reach safety. Some succeeded.

Focusing on the three spots, I imagined the moment the siren went off on July 27 at 6:18 p.m.

The light bulb illuminated in my head, a painful and crushing realization.

I realized that taking any direct or indirect line from anywhere on the field toward the gate opening and through to the migunit, the children’s legs were actually propelling them not toward shelter, but death. They had no way to know that, with the Falaq rocket, Iran’s gift to its Hezbollah proxy, coming from behind them. It landed on and amid the fleeing, terrified children.

Had the migunit not arrived, the children would’ve been told to stop and lie prone where they were, covering their heads—standard procedure in the absence of any shelter. They’d have been farther from the missile’s impact point. Many of the 12 would be alive now.

After running into the father and son entering the field late that Wednesday night, I walked around the rectangle, absorbing the site and the scene. Lamp stanchions provided light as they do when kids played there at night. This time, clusters of adolescents sat on the field, silent but for occasional whispers.

As I circled back toward the goal near the main gate, a man rushed up and pressed into my hands five tiny tin-encased candles, each containing a half-inch depth of wax, at most. I stepped to a memorial of pictures and objects, and crouched beside a white shelf lying upon the turf. I took several larger candles there and arrayed them in a circle around my baby tins as shields from the breeze, took a lighter sitting there, flicked it to produce a weak flame, and touched it to a wick.

The wind snuffed out the fire, then another and another. I cupped a hand around the lighter’s head to shield each flame. I moved the large candleholders into a tighter circle, a more protective wall. I tried other lighters. At best, here and there, a wick remained lit for two seconds before the wind extinguished it.

I departed, unable to protect the tiny candles.