Eleven people have been killed and many others injured in a rocket attack that hit a town in the israeli occupied Golan Heights. Many of the casualties were children who were playing on a football pitch in the town of Majal Shams. Israel has blamed Lebanon's Hezbollah movement. It has denied responsibility. Mark Lohan sent us this report.

Early evening in the israeli occupied Golan Heights and the warning of an incoming threat about to become deadly and dangerous. A rocket struck a football field where children and teenagers were playing. Several were killed in the deadliest strike since the cross border fire between Lebanon and Israel began last October. The anguish of loved ones at young lives cut short in a conflict that could be about to escalate sharply. A rocket barrage today which lit up the sky was claimed by the lebanese militant group Hezbollah. But it denies firing the deadly strike onto the football field that the israeli army spokesman says is a lie.

This attack shows the true face of Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that targets and murders children playing soccer on a Saturday evening. We will act to restore full security on our northern border for all the citizens of the state of Israel.

And the question is how Israels government will react. Benjamin Netanyahu is returning early from the US to chair his security cabinet, where hell face calls to hit back hard as the young injured were rushed to hospital. Fear is growing that all out war with Hezbollah, a proxy of Iran, could now be drawing closer south in Gaza, the other front of this war, Palestinians, too, were scrambling to save lives this time after israeli strikes killed dozens. Here, too, its children paying the price in a nightmare with no end, the missiles tore into a school housing displaced Gazans. Israel says it targeted a Hamas command and control center inside. But from the rubble came those simply seeking shelter. Mustafa says the blast threw him into the air and he fell to the ground. I didn't know where to run for fear, he says. So I fled inside the school thinking it was safe. But then I saw heads, hands and feet. The spark from the 7 October ignited Garza and now Golan. The question tonight is, will it start an inferno? Mark Low in BBC News Jerusalem.

And let's talk to our diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, who is in Jerusalem tonight. And that is key, Paul, isn't it? What does this mean? What could it mean for Israel and the wider region?

Yeah, Jane, I was with a western diplomat when news of this attack broke, and he voiced the fear that everyone is expressing tonight. This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past ten months, that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all out war. Some kind of israeli response looks absolutely inevitable. If you think back a week or so to that Yemeni Houthi drone attack in Tel Aviv that killed one civilian, that triggered a major israeli response. And so I think that is likely to happen. We are still in claim and counterclaim territory. Hezbollah says that it was not responsible for this rocket, but at just about the time when those first reports of injuries were coming in, they claimed to have hit a nearby israeli military base. So it does look likely that Hezbollah was responsible, and the fears that that diplomat was expressing and everyone here are feeling those fears could soon be realized.