Airstrike on Lebanon kills six children as three families devastated – with nothing left of home they were sheltering in
There seemed little sign of any let-up in the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon with a spray of early morning strikes in the south. There were others in the eastern Bekaa Valley and northeast of the capital, Beirut.
While we were in the hills of Mount Lebanon region in the southwest of the country, there were regular airstrikes landing south of us. Israeli drones circled above and we heard sonic booms as Israeli jets broke the sound barrier.
“These are tactics to terrorise us,” one resident in the village of Joun told us.
Weeping women and Al Risala scouts gathered with crowds of other Joun villagers for the funeral of a six-year-old boy, his mother and his father.
The family was one of three inside a home high above the village when the Israeli bomb hit.
There’s nothing left of the home now.
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The coffin of a young boy is carried
The father, Khodor Raad, is well-known locally. He ran a taxi service and worked as a welder but was also involved in Hezbollah’s social welfare programmes, according to the village’s residents.
“He was not a fighter,” one Hezbollah representative told us. “The area where he lived would not allow weapons there, for sure.”
The villagers we spoke to told us Khodor’s family had taken in two other families who had been displaced by the recent Israeli bombardment.
One family of three children and their mother was from Syria while the second family, a mother and her two children, had fled the onslaught in the south just a day earlier.
Khodor was the senior adult male in the house. The other males were his young son, Hassan, and two elder brothers, one a teenager.
The airstrike just after 10.30am on Wednesday wiped out the bulk of three families, killing six children, three mothers and the patriarch Khodor.
Hassan’s brothers somehow escaped. The elder of the two, 21-year-old Ahmad, had to be pulled out of the rubble with head wounds and a lacerated hand. Yousuf, 15, seems to have escaped unscathed.
This is the first time Mount Lebanon Governorate has been hit in nearly a year of increasingly deadly exchanges between Israel and Lebanon. During this time (according to the non-profit organisation ACLED) Israel has fired nearly five times as many missiles into Lebanon as Hezbollah has launched into Israel.
But the exchanges until a week ago were mainly confined to the border region, although they’d caused a serious amount of displacement in both Israel and Lebanon. About 60,000 Israelis have fled their homes and 120,000 families have had to abandon their houses on the Lebanese side.
This week though, the massive spike in Israeli airstrikes – more than a thousand in a single day on Monday – plus the Israeli authorities’ warnings to evacuate – prompted another huge wave of people to up and move to try to escape the bombings.
The Lebanese government has estimated the displacement is likely to reach half a million with a rapidly growing humanitarian crisis.
The funerals in Joun have stunned the small community who have opened their homes to thousands of displaced people.
“Please treat our displaced brothers and sisters with courtesy and kindness,” the village representative told the funeral crowds.
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The body of the young boy Hassan at the funeral
Six-year-old Hassan’s school friends and fellow scouts were among the funeral mourners and his scout leader, who was one of the pallbearers, openly sobbed.
“We are civilians,” said a family relative called Mostafa Issa – despite the presence of young soldiers clad in military-style camouflage outfits.
At the head of the pallbearers was Hassan’s elder brother, Ahmad, also in uniform – a fact which officials attempted to explain away by saying “he’d just put on the uniform for the funeral”.
“The Israelis are claiming they are targeting Hezbollah weapons,” Mostafa Issa told us. “But this family took in two other displaced families! Why would they have weapons? They are civilians and the Israelis are hitting civilians.”
He went on: “These crimes should stop wherever they are being carried out – in Lebanon, Gaza and Syria.”
The crushed family home is a pile of rubble now. Vehicles parked around it, including their neighbours’, are mangled.
School books can be seen half buried in the broken stones, as well as a child’s pair of trousers.
Hussein told Sky News: ‘We are all willing to die’
“We are prepared to die,” said one young man called Hussein. “We are not the terrorists! It is the one who is bombing us and our homes who is the terrorist. We are all prepared to die for humanity.”
He went on, his face quivering with emotion: “40,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. And yet it is us who are called the terrorists.”
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Hezbollah is a proscribed terror outfit in Israel, the USA and the UK, among other nations. And it has a fierce control over parts of the country, particularly the south.
It has a powerful weapons cache, including long-range missiles, has tens of thousands of fighters and enjoys financial and intelligence support from Iran.
But the militant group also has a political wing with MPs in parliament and an active social welfare programme running schools, hospitals and aid groups which further cements its grip on parts of the population.
Additional reporting by: camera Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham, and Lebanon producers Jihad Jineid, Sami Zein and Hwaida Saad
Russia has launched a “massive” drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian capital overnight, after Moscow itself was targeted.
Amid flailing peace talks, the Kremlin’s nightly attacks on Ukraine continued.
Ukraine war – follow the latest updates
A large-scale Russian attack through the night into Sunday injured at least 11 in Kyiv and killed three people in towns surrounding the capital.
There were attacks elsewhere as well, including drone strikes in Mykolaiv, where a residential building was hit.
An apartment building destroyed after a Russian attack in Mykolaiv. Pic: State Emergency Service of Ukraine
‘Massive’ attack
In Kyiv, the city’s administration warned “the night will be difficult”, as people were urged to remain in shelters.
The city’s mayor Vitaliy Klitschko described it as a “massive” attack.
He said: “Explosions in the city. Air defence forces are working. The capital is under attack by enemy UAVs. Do not neglect your safety! Stay in shelters!”
It came after at least 15 people were injured in attacks the night prior.
Russia claimed it also faced a Ukrainian drone attack on Sunday, and that it intercepted and destroyed around 100 of them near Moscow and across Russia’s central and southern regions.
A municipality worker cleans up after a Russian drone strike on Kyiv. Pic: Reuters
Russia ‘dragging out the war’
Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine continued a prisoner exchange, marking a rare moment of cooperation in the war.
Amid the most recent attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeated his calls for sanctions on Russia.
Russia “fills each day with horror and murder” and is “simply dragging out the war”, he said.
A resident looks at an apartment building that was damaged in a Russian drone strike. Pic: Reuters
“All of this demands a response – a strong response from the United States, from Europe, and from everyone in the world who wants this war to end,” Mr Zelenskyy added.
Every day “gives new grounds for sanctions against Russia”, he said, and each day without pressure proves the “war will continue”.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is ready for “any form of diplomacy that delivers real results”.
Nine of a doctor’s 10 children have been killed in an Israeli missile strike on their home in Gaza, which also left her surviving son badly injured and her husband in a critical condition.
Warning: This article contains details of child deaths
Alaa Al Najjar, a paediatrician at Al Tahrir Clinic in the Nasser Medical Complex, was at work during the attack on her home, south of the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, on Friday.
Graphic footage shared by the Hamas-run Palestinian Civil Defence shows the bodies of at least seven small children being pulled from the rubble.
Rescuers can be seen battling fires and searching through a collapsed building, shouting out when they locate a body, before bringing the children out one by one and wrapping their remains in body bags.
In the footage, Dr Al Najjar’s husband, Hamdi Al Najjar, who is also a doctor, is put on to a stretcher and then carried to an ambulance.
The oldest of their children was only 12 years old, according to Dr Muneer Alboursh, the director general of Gaza’s health ministry, which is run by Hamas.
Nine children were killed in the strike. Pic: Palestinian Civil Defence
“This is the reality our medical staff in Gaza endure. Words fall short in describing the pain,” he wrote in a social media post.
“In Gaza, it is not only healthcare workers who are targeted – Israel’s aggression goes further, wiping out entire families.”
Pic: Palestinian Civil Defence
British doctors describe ‘horrific’ and ‘unimaginable’ attack
Two British doctors working at Nasser Hospital described the attack as “horrific” and “unimaginable” for Dr Al Najjar.
Speaking in a video diary on Friday night, Dr Graeme Groom said his last patient of the day was Dr Al Najjar’s 11-year-old son, who was badly injured and “seemed much younger as we lifted him on to the operating table”.
Hamdi Al Najjar, Dr Al Najjar’s husband who is also a doctor, was taken to hospital. Pic: Palestinian Civil Defence
The strike “may or may not have been aimed at his father”, Dr Groom said, adding that the man had been left “very badly injured”.
Dr Victoria Rose said the family “lived opposite a petrol station, so I don’t know whether the bomb set off some massive fire”.
Pic: Palestinian Civil Defence
‘No political or military connections’
Dr Groom added: “It is unimaginable for that poor woman, both of them are doctors here.
“The father was a physician at Nasser Hospital. He had no political and no military connections. He doesn’t seem to be prominent on social media, and yet his poor wife is the only uninjured one, who has the prospect of losing her husband.”
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Nineteen of Gaza’s hospitals remain operational, all of them are overwhelmed with the number of patients and a lack of supplies
He said it was “a particularly sad day”, while Dr Rose added: “That is life in Gaza. That is the way it goes in Gaza.”
Sky News has approached the Israeli Defence Forces for comment.
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Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza began when the militant group stormed across the border into Israel on 7 October 2023, killing some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducting 251 others.
Israel’s military response has flattened large areas of Gaza and killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count.
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UN’s Antonio Guterres condemns ‘teaspoon’ of aid allowed into Gaza after dozens die in airstrikes
The head of the UN has said Israel has only authorised for Gaza what amounts to a “teaspoon” of aid after at least 60 people died in overnight airstrikes.
UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said on Friday the supplies approved so far “amounts to a teaspoon of aid when a flood of assistance is required,” adding “the needs are massive and the obstacles are staggering”.
He warned that more people will die unless there is “rapid, reliable, safe and sustained aid access”.
A woman at the site of an Israeli strike in Jabalia, northern Gaza. Pic: Reuters
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Gaza: ‘Loads of children with huge burns’
Israel says around 300 aid trucks have been allowed through since it lifted an 11-week blockade on Monday, but according to Mr Guterres, only about a third have been transported to warehouses within Gaza due to insecurity.
The IDF said 107 vehicles carrying flour, food, medical equipment and drugs were allowed through on Thursday.
Many of Gaza’s two million residents are at high risk of famine, experts have warned.
Meanwhile, at least 60 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes across Gaza overnight.
Ten people died in the southern city of Khan Younis, and deaths were also reported in the central town of Deir al-Balah and the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north, according to the Nasser, Al-Aqsa and Al-Ahli hospitals where the bodies were brought.
A body is carried out of rubble after an Israeli strike in Jabalia, northern Gaza. Pic: Reuters
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‘Almost everyone depends on aid’ in Gaza
The latest strikes came a day after two Israeli embassy workers were killed in Washington.
The suspect, named as 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, Illinois, told police he “did it for Gaza”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of fuelling antisemitism following the shootings.
The leaders of the UK, France and Canada are “on the wrong side of humanity and (…) history”, he said, after they threatened “concrete action” against Israel this week if it continues its “egregious” military operations in Gaza.
Mr Netanyahu also accused Sir Keir, Mr Macron and Mr Carney of siding with “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”.
Palestinians search for casualties in Jabalia, northern Gaza. Pic: Reuters
But UK government minister Luke Pollard told Sky News on Friday morning he “doesn’t recognise” Mr Netanyahu’s accusation.
Earlier this week, Mr Netanyahu said he was recalling negotiators from the Qatari capital, Doha, after a week of ceasefire talks failed to bring results. A working team will remain.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251 others.
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
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The militants are still holding 58 captives, around a third of whom are believed to be alive, after most of the rest were returned in ceasefire agreements or other deals.
Israel’s offensive, which has destroyed large swaths of Gaza, has killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
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