Fourteen-year-old Eitan Masouri, still recovering from shrapnel wounds to his neck, sat with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Rambam Hospital in Haifa and described the moment an unexploded Hezbollah cluster munition detonated during his school’s hike on Ramim Ridge near the Lebanon border. “He unscrewed it, and then it exploded. The guys were thrown, and there were about two seconds of shock. Then they told me I was bleeding. I realized I was bleeding from my neck,” the student recounted. The blast on October 12 struck a group from ORT Ma’alot yeshiva high school, killing one teenager and wounding roughly two dozen others, many with serious shrapnel injuries. Masouri said he saw a friend hurt and tried to help even as he realized his own wounds. Netanyahu arrived at the hospital with Education Minister Yoav Kisch to meet the injured students and their families, hearing firsthand accounts of the sudden violence that turned a routine field trip into a mass-casualty event. Authorities confirmed the device was a remnant from prior Hezbollah rocket fire that had failed to explode on impact and remained in the area.

The prime minister immediately ordered the Home Front Command to tighten public guidelines and warnings, stressing the strict prohibition against touching any debris or unexploded ordnance while directing extensive scans of the region to locate additional remnants. Preliminary investigations indicated one student had picked up the munition, handled it, and placed it in a bag before it detonated, scattering shrapnel among the group of students and teachers. Emergency teams, including Magen David Adom crews and military units, raced to the scene near the border and evacuated the wounded to hospitals across the north. The Education Ministry moved quickly to divert other school groups from the area in the following days as the scale of the danger became clear. Masouri’s calm testimony under the hospital lights captured both the sudden terror of the explosion and the instinct to aid others amid the chaos. The incident has left families grieving, dozens recovering, and officials reinforcing long-standing alerts about the lingering hazards of wartime munitions still scattered across northern Israel.