Schools and universities in Nabatiya were closed after the attack. (document)
Nabatiere:
Hussein Barjawi invited his daughter, her husband and their two young sons to dinner in southern Lebanon, but Israeli attacks nearly wiped them out, an official said Thursday.
An Israeli attack on a building in the southern city of Nabatiyah killed a Hezbollah commander and two fighters from the powerful Lebanese Movement on Wednesday, as well as seven civilians from the same family, a security source said. Blast to death.
Lebanon’s official state news agency reported that Hussein Barjawi, his daughters Amani and Zeinab, his sister Fatima and Zeinab’s son Mahmoud Amir were killed in the attack. The boy Hussein Amir was rescued alive from the rubble.
Security sources later told AFP that Bajawi’s wife and niece were also killed.
It was the bloodiest civilian death toll in a single attack in Lebanon since cross-border hostilities erupted in October between Israeli and Iranian-backed groups.
Amin Shomar, a local official in southern Lebanon, said Ali Amir, his wife and two sons, aged three and four, “were invited to dinner at his father-in-law’s home in Nabatiyah” “.
Shomar told AFP that Amir was “seriously injured” during the strike and was taken to hospital, while his wife and son were killed and his other son was rescued from the rubble.
Video circulating on social media purportedly showed the boy, wearing a blue tracksuit, being rescued with a bloodied face next to a mattress in the rubble.
An AFP photographer said the ground and first floors of the three-storey residential building were hit, with fragments of furniture scattered among the rubble.
Security sources said Hezbollah militants lived on the ground floor while the family lived on the first floor.
The Israeli military confirmed that a Hezbollah commander, deputy and another fighter were killed in Wednesday’s attack.
A statement said Ali Debs and two fighters “were killed in a precision airstrike by IDF aircraft on Hezbollah military buildings in Nabatiyah.”
Shocked by sudden violence
Schools, universities and local administrative offices in Nabatiya were closed on Thursday following the attack.
The Israeli military and Iran-backed Hezbollah have been engaged in almost daily cross-border fighting since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October.
The Lebanese group said it was taking action to support Palestinian ally Hamas in its attacks on Israel.
An Israeli attack on southern Lebanon on Wednesday killed fifteen people, including five Hezbollah fighters, and an Israeli soldier was killed by an unclaimed rocket coming from Lebanon.
The dead include a woman, her 2-year-old child and 13-year-old stepson from the village of Sawwaneh, NNA reported.
Tarek Mroueh, 35, who works for a pharmaceutical company, expressed shock at the sudden violence in the Nabatiya neighborhood.
Earlier on Thursday, before news broke that a Hezbollah commander was also in the building, he said he believed a Hezbollah member’s house could be targeted.
“But later we learned that this was the building of Hussein Barjawi. He was a civilian and not affiliated with any political party,” Mrouei said.
Also speaking earlier on Thursday, Mohammed Bdeir, a 67-year-old machinist whose workshop is nearby, said “civilians are being targeted.”
Nabatyeh had been relatively immune to cross-border violence until February 8, when an Israeli drone strike on a car killed a Hezbollah commander in an attack on Wednesday.
Cross-border hostilities have killed at least 259 people on the Lebanese side, mostly Hezbollah fighters but also including 40 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
According to the Israeli Armed Forces, 10 soldiers and 6 civilians were killed on the Israeli side
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
