Israel has issued evacuation orders for a huge amount of civilian areas of Lebanon, particularly in the south. This has displaced over a million people, who are fleeing to anyplace outside the evacuation. Getting outside those areas doesn’t mean they’re safe from attacks, however.
That was underscored today when Israel carried out multiple airstrikes on a residential building in the town of Haret Saida, in southern Lebanon. The town was not covered by any of the evacuation orders, and so over 17,000 displaced civilians fled to the town, packing its residential district. Then the missiles came anyhow.
The resulting attack killed eight people, and wounded at least 25, all of them civilians. One of the slain was a child. There were some early reports that the attacks aimed to kill Hezbollah member Hussein Fneish, and that most of the slain were members of his family. There is no indication he was killed, or even present during the strikes.
Hussein is a brother of Muhammad Fneish, a politician and member of Hezbollah’s political wing. Muhammad has formerly been Lebanon’s Labor Minister and more recently their Youth Minister.
Israel has yet to comment on the airstrikes, nor to explain why they attacked a town that was excluded from evacuation orders and known to contain a huge number of displaced civilians. Other attacks reported today also killed a number of civilians, including children slain in Baalbek.
The Haret Saida attacks caused a lot of damage to cars and nearby businesses, as well as doing substantial harm to a three-storey apartment building which was apparently the intended target.
