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.
Follow latest:
Netanyahu says military will keep fighting with ‘full force’
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.
Read more:
Washington says a Lebanon ceasefire is ‘close’
British mum trying to flee Lebanon with her children
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.”
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
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
Elon Musk could be on track for a $1trn pay packet.
Tesla shareholders have approved the whopping financial package for the CEO – who’s already worth an estimated $491bn – if he hits a series of ambitious targets over the next 10 years.
But that $1trn figure (or £761,910,000,000) – which is both one thousand billion and one million million – is almost impossible to imagine for most people.
Even so, we have drilled down into the numbers and examined what you can do with a trillion US dollars – and it turns out, quite a lot.
Show me the money
Laid end to end, a trillion one-dollar bills would cover a distance of approximately 156 billion metres.
That could wrap around the equator 3,890 times, easily reach the sun from Earth (around 149.6 million km) or loop from Earth to the moon 405 times.
That many one-dollar notes could cover a massive area (roughly 10,339 km squared), meaning you could blanket nearly all of Lebanon or Jamaica in bills.
Spend it on sport
You could splash out on virtually all of the world’s major sporting leagues.
The clubs which make up the Premier League are relatively cheap ($30bn), and even when snapping up the UEFA Champions League clubs and the big five top divisions of Spain, Italy, Germany, and France, there’s still $858bn left in the kitty.
The four major US sports leagues for ice hockey, baseball, basketball, and American football (NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL) have a rough valuation of $544bn, according to Sportico.
But then add the IPL cricket league ($120bn) and F1 ($23.1bn) and Musk still has change from an estimated total spend of $829.7bn.
Elon Musk is in the money if he hits targets set by Tesla’s shareholders. File pic: AP
Take over Tesla’s rivals
He could buy up the top 15 largest publicly traded automakers (excluding Tesla) by market capitalisation.
They would include firms like Japan’s Toyota ($275bn), Chinese automaker BYD ($120bn), and luxury brands like Ferrari ($81bn) and Mercedes-Benz ($62bn), as well as BMW ($52bn), Volkswagen ($50bn) and Ford ($48bn).
But there would still be a little change left over; the total bill would be an eye-watering $992bn.
Buy up San Diego
He could buy up every single residential property in San Diego County – valued at a total of $1trn. Seattle is just slightly out of reach at $1.1trn, according to recent data from real estate firm Zillow.
But if he wanted to buy big – there is always Tennessee. The total value of homes in the US state is estimated at $957bn. Or there is Maryland, which at $1.01trn could be bought if he can find a little more cash behind the sofa.
Sadly, he would struggle to scoop up London’s entire housing stock, which in February was valued at just under £2trn ($2.53trn), according to agents Savills.
Cities like New York ($4.6trn) and Los Angeles ($3.9trn) are also not within his budget, hosting America’s most expensive residential markets.
Do something charitable?
There is always the possibility Musk could follow in the footsteps of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who intends to give away 99% of his vast fortune over the next 20 years.
He could give every single man, woman, and child in the US a share of his cash pile. They would receive approximately $2,917.32 (£2,223.29), based on a population estimate of 342.7 million.
Although it would be roughly $14,348.79 (£10,935.20) for every person (roughly 69.6 million) in the UK.
If he wanted to give the entire globe an early Christmas present, then based on the rough world population estimate of 8.2 billion, everyone would receive $121.80 (£92.87).
Pay off the credit card
With $1trn, he could instantly rewrite history and erase debt interest payments and the government debt from dozens of the world’s sovereign nations.
Or Musk could wipe out the debts of Singapore ($1trn) or South Korea ($0.99trn) in one go, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook (Oct 2025).
But when it comes to the biggest debt-laden countries, $1trn would not even touch the sides.
The US has $38.3trn of government debt (just over one third of the total global debt pile) while the UK has a modest $4.1trn.
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024