Israeli strikes across southern Lebanon have left at least three civilians dead since Monday, including a TV presenter for Lebanon’s Al Manar TV identified as Ali Nour al-Din, who was killed on his motorcycle in the city of Tyre.
The IDF confirmed the strike and the assassination of Nour al-Din, but as is so often the case their narrative is wildly different from the facts on the ground, as they declared Nour al-Din a “Hezbollah artillery commander,” which is quite a bit different from a TV journalist riding a motorcycle.
Al Manar TV, like a lot of things in Lebanon, has long been accused of being “Hezbollah-linked,” so trying to translate Nour al-Din to a Hezbollah-adjacent figure wouldn’t have been a stretch for the IDF. Posthumously promoting a TV personality to a field commander, however, seems a challenge, and the fact that the IDF knew the name of the person they killed for a change really only reflects that they killed a local celebrity. The Committee to Protect Journalists had previously reported six Lebanese journalists deliberately killed by Israel since 2023, and this seemingly raises that number to seven.
Hezbollah issued a statement on the killing, declaring it “an attack that rises to the level of a war crime and is added to the enemy’s record, replete with brutal crimes against journalists, civilians, and humanity as a whole.” They suggested that the international community should raise their voices loudly against “this Zionist savagery.”
The other two civilians were targeted and killed in a car in Doueir, in the Nabatieh District. They were identified as 22-year-old university student Samer Alaa Hattit and a 22-year-old Egyptian national named Ahmed Abdel Nabi Ramadan, who has been living in Doueir.
The IDF statement on that matter should surprise no one, as they claimed to have targeted “two Hezbollah operatives in the Nabatieh District” without offering any details or evidence to that effect.
Since the ceasefire in November of 2024 that nominally ended the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the IDF has treated any functioning vehicles that remain in southern Lebanon as de facto evidence of Hezbollah affiliation, seemingly assuming no one else could still have an undestroyed car or motorcycle after protracted Israeli invasion and widespread destruction.
That practice has left many civilians who fled north during the invasion and then returned to what was left of their towns and villages as primary targets for Israeli drones, which carried out strikes on a near daily basis, and whoever they kill, it is always declared to be a Hezbollah figure, often a high-ranking one. Since the IDF never offers evidence, there is no obstacle to them continuing to do so.
