Israel’s airstrike on a Christian-majority village in northern Lebanon wiped out an entire family that was displaced from southern Lebanon, AFP reported on Tuesday.
The attack, which hit the village of Aitou on Monday, killed 23 people, including at least 12 women and two children. Local residents were shocked by the attack on the Christian area that’s far from the Israeli border. The owner of the building, Elie Alwan, said it was a “massacre that happened in my home.”
Alwan said he had known the family, who were Shi’ite Muslims, for 15 years. “They were a decent family,” he said. “I welcomed them as friends.” Alwan was not home when the strike hit the building, but his mother was wounded in the attack.
The UN’s human rights office is calling for an investigation into the strike, with its spokesman saying there are “real concerns with respect to … the laws of war.” Israel claimed it targeted a building owned by Hezbollah, but Alwan is not a member of Hezbollah.
Security sources told AFP that the strike was launched after a man in a car arrived at the building to visit the family, and Alwan said that he blamed “the man who came here. Why did you put us in this mess?”
There have been no claims that the man was a Hezbollah fighter, and if he was, there’s no way he could pose a threat to Israel from the northern village. There’s been speculation that the strike was primarily a revenge attack against Lebanon in general after a Sunday drone strike by Hezbollah on an Israeli military base killed four soldiers and wounded scores of others
Alwan’s brother, Sarkis, who lives next door to the bombed building, said they would no longer take in families fleeing from the south. “We are Christians, our religion teaches us tolerance. But now we have learned our lesson. We will no longer welcome anyone into the family [home],” he said.
Israeli strikes have wiped out other families who fled southern Lebanon, following a similar pattern to Gaza, where Israel frequently bombs areas it has deemed so-called “safe zones.” An Israeli strike on central Beirut last week killed a family of eight, including three children, who fled from the south.
