Shadi Charara, a car dealer from southern Lebanon, had family members living in the US and sought to join them before he was killed along with three of his young children by an Israeli drone strike on Sunday, The Associated Press reported on Tuesday.
Charara, his 18-month-old twin son and daughter, Hadi and Silan, and his eight-year-old daughter, Celine, and one of his cousins who was also killed by the strike, were buried in the town of Bint Jbeil on Tuesday. The mother of the children, Amani Bazi, and her eldest daughter survived the attack but were seriously wounded.
The Israeli drone strike was one of thousands of Israeli violations of a ceasefire deal that was signed in November 2024. The IDF has flagrantly violated the deal both by continuing near-daily strikes on Lebanon and continuing its occupation of southern Lebanon by maintaining five military outposts in the area.
Charara and his children were killed while driving from Bint Jbeil to Tyre, and his cousin, Mohammed Majed Mroue, just happened to be passing by on a motorcycle when the Israeli drone strike hit, according to family members.
Israel acknowledged that it killed civilians in the strike and also claimed it targeted a Hezbollah member, but there’s no evidence Mroue was affiliated with the group. The AP noted that during the funeral, the coffins were draped in Lebanese flags, and there were no Hezbollah flags seen in the crowd.
Sam Bazzi, the children’s maternal grandfather, said the family wasn’t worried about being targeted since they had no affiliation with Hezbollah. “We’re regular citizens and we don’t belong to any group. And so we thought we had nothing to do with it and we were just living normally, coming and going,” he said.
After the drone strike on Sunday, the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament, Nabih Berri, said Charara and his children were US citizens, which the US State Department later disputed. Charara’s family clarified to the AP that he did not have citizenship, but his siblings and father live in the United States and are citizens. They said Charara had applied to join them and recently received approval, but was still waiting for visas.
