On Sunday, the first IDF soldier from the Druze town of Majdal Shams was killed in combat.

Sgt. First Class Maher Khatar, 38, of the Combat Engineering Corps, was killed alongside Staff Sgt. Or Damari near the Tzivoni outpost – one of five outposts the IDF set up in South Lebanon after the ceasefire agreement signed in November 2024. The two were struck by a mortar shell or a missile fired by Hezbollah as they went out in D9 bulldozers to rescue a stuck tank.

As a result, Majdal Shams, a town of about 12,000 residents, held its first military funeral. In this small town near the Syrian border and the slopes of Mount Hermon, IDF soldiers are still a rare sight, but it seems that this, too, is about to change.

Just over a week before Khatar was killed, and two days before the start of the second war with Iran, The Times of Israel visited Majdal Shams as part of a tour along the Israel–Syria border.

The entire sector felt as if it were sitting on burning coals. Despite the ceasefire agreement, Israeli residents near the Syrian border said they felt unsafe and were longing for the moment the IDF would change its security paradigm and strike across the border.

The situation changed on Saturday, February 28, with the joint US-Israeli attack on senior Iranian regime figures. A few days later, Israel also responded to Hezbollah fire from Lebanon, resuming Israel’s campaign against the terror organization.

An obligatory stop in Majdal Shams is the soccer field in the heart of the town, where 12 young children were killed when a Hezbollah rocket hit the grounds on the morning of Saturday, July 24, 2024, while a youth game was taking place.

The tragedy left the town and the three other nearby Druze villages – Mas’ada, Ein Qiniyye, and Buq’ata – grieving and furious. A memorial is currently being built at the site of the rocket crater. Surrounding it are sports fields and a toddler’s playground, serving as a violent and painful testament to the massacre site’s centrality in the daily life of Majdal Shams.

The tour of the Syrian border took place as part of a seminar organized by the Dvora Forum, an Israeli organization dedicated to women in national security and foreign policy, and was led by Lt. Col. (res.) Sarit Zehavi, head of the Alma Research and Education Center, which studies Israel’s security challenges in the north.

A man involved in local civilian matters, who asked not to be identified, noted that local residents were astonished by the amount of support and solidarity they received from people across Israel following the Majdal Shams tragedy.

Despite the warm relationship between the Druze and the rest of the country’s residents, they were surprised by the embrace and attention, which did not fade even as time passed.

And the fact that Majdal Shams has now also suffered its first military fatality is a somber testament to the ongoing transformation within the four Druze villages in the northern Golan Heights.

For many years, the Golan Druze........

© The Times of Israel