Israeli forces carried out a strike against a car inside northwestern Lebanon near the Syrian border, wounding six people. Five of the wounded were Syrian nationals and two of them were women. The sixth person was a Lebanese citizen.
The strike took place on the outskirts of Hawsh al-Sayyid Ali, along the border between Syria’s Homs Governorate and Lebanon’s Hermel District. This area has historically been relatively quiet, and free of Israeli attack.
The IDF, for its part, claimed that the attack targeted a “Syrian terrorist” named Yusuf Ali al-Hassoun. They claimed Hassoun was targeting Israeli civilians under the direction of Iran, and planning to launch drones against Israeli troops in southern Syria.
The site of an Israeli drone strike in Hermel District, Lebanon | Image from X
Conspicuously absent from the IDF’s statement, however, was whether or not Hassoun was even actually present in the vehicle, and reports on the followup of the attack don’t explicitly name of any of the wounded people as Hassoun.
This is unusual in that the IDF felt the need to offer a specific justification for this particular attack, which they often don’t do at all in their Syria or Lebanon strikes, and named an explicit target, even if they didn’t clarify if they actually hit him or if he was even present at all.
Notably, reports from the scene were that the drone strike didn’t even directly hit the car, but landed alongside it. Given that and the further uncertainty about the intended target, it’s not clear that the car and the casualties within were intentional at all, or simply happened to be present when the Israelis struck.
