Four US citizens, including three children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon on Sunday, September 21. Israel's military confirmed that it had killed a Hezbollah operator in the southern town of Bint Jbeil. The military said that “several uninvolved civilians” were also killed in the strike.
“The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimize harm as much as possible. The incident is under review,” it said in a statement. Victims killed in Israeli strike were identified as a father and three of his children, who were US citizens, according to Lebanon’s Speaker of the Parliament, Nabih Berri, in a statement mourning their deaths, as per a CNN report.
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Earlier, Lebanon Foreign Minister Youssef Raji said a woman whose mother of three children was injured in the Israeli attack and is in a critical condition.
Lebanese local news channel stated that two drones were used in the attack, where they fired missiles at a motorcycle and a Mercedes car. In the car, the father and his children were killed. The motorcyclist, the apparent target of the strike, was also killed.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam described the attack as a “massacre” against civilians, adding that the Israeli strike constituted a “message of intimidation targeting our people returning to their villages in the south.”
He urged the international community to condemn Israel “in the strongest terms for its repeated violations of international resolutions and international law.”
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said it was “shocked and outraged by the killing of three children from the same family in an airstrike in South Lebanon. Attacks on children are unconscionable,” in a post on X on Sunday.
“No child should ever pay the price of conflict with their life. Hostilities must cease immediately to ensure the protection of every child,” it said.