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
Israel has approved a plan to capture all of the Gaza Strip and remain there for an unspecified length of time, Israeli officials say.
According to Reuters, the plan includes distributing aid, though supplies will not be let in yet.
The Israeli official told the agency that the newly approved offensive plan would move Gaza’s civilian population southward and keep humanitarian aid from falling into Hamas’s hands.
On Sunday, the United Nations rejected what it said was a new plan for aid to be distributed in what it described as Israeli hubs.
Israeli cabinet ministers approved plans for the new offensive on Monday morning, hours after it was announced that tens of thousands of reserve soldiers are being called up.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far failed to achieve his goal of destroying Hamas or returning all the hostages, despite more than a year of brutal war in Gaza.
Palestinian children struggle to get donated food at a community kitchen in Khan Younis, Gaza. Pic: AP
Officials say the plan will help with these war aims but it would also push hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to southern Gaza, exacerbating an already dire humanitarian crisis.
They said the plan included the “capturing of the strip and the holding of territories”.
It would also try to prevent Hamas from distributing humanitarian aid, which Israel says strengthens the group’s rule in Gaza.
The UN rejected the plan, saying it would leave large parts of the population, including the most vulnerable, without supplies.
It said it “appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – as part of a military strategy”.
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More than 52,000 Palestinians have been killed since the IDF launched its ground offensive in the densely-populated territory, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
It followed the deadly Hamas attacks on Israel, which killed 1,200 people and saw around 250 people taken hostage.
A fragile ceasefire that saw a pause in the fighting and the exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners collapsed earlier this year.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to retaliate against the Houthis and their Iranian “masters” after the group launched a missile attack on the country’s main international airport.
A missile fired by the group from Yemen landed near Ben Gurion Airport, causing panic among passengers in the terminal building.
“Attacks by the Houthis emanate from Iran,” Mr Netanyahu wrote on X. “Israel will respond to the Houthi attack against our main airport AND, at a time and place of our choosing, to their Iranian terror masters.”
Israeli police officers investigate the missile crater. Pic: Reuters
The missile impact left a plume of smoke and briefly halted flights and commuter traffic at the airport. Some international carriers have cancelled flights to and from Tel Aviv for several days.
Four people were lightly wounded, paramedic service Magen David Adom said.
Air raid sirens went off across Israel and footage showed passengers yelling and rushing for cover.
The attack came hours before senior Israeli cabinet ministers were set to vote on whether to intensify the country’s military operations in the Gaza Strip, and as the army began calling up thousands of reserves in anticipation of a wider operation in the enclave.
Houthi military spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree said the group fired a hypersonic ballistic missile at the airport.
Iran’s defence minister later told a state TV broadcaster that if the country was attacked by the US or Israel, it would target their bases, interests and forces where necessary.
Israel’s military said several attempts to intercept the missile were unsuccessful.
Air, road and rail traffic were halted after the attack, police said, though it resumed around an hour later.
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Yemen’s Houthis have been firing missiles at Israel since its war with Hamas in Gaza began on 7 October 2023, and while most have been intercepted, some have penetrated the country’s missile defence systems and caused damage.
Israel has previously struck the group in Yemen in retaliation and the US and UK have also launched strikes after the Houthis began attacking international shipping, saying it was in solidarity with Palestinians over Israel’s war with Hamas.
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