Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group said early Thursday that five of its fighters, including the son of a senior lawmaker, had been killed, amid skirmishes at the Israel-Lebanon border since the Israel-Hamas war began.
Abbas Raad, son of the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc Mohammed Raad, was “martyred on the road to Jerusalem”, the group said in a statement — the phrase it has been using to announce the death of its members due to Israeli fire since the war started on October 7.
It issued separate statements with the identities and photographs of four other fighters who were also killed.
A source close to the family, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media, told AFP that Abbas Raad “was killed with a number of other Hezbollah members” in an Israeli strike Wednesday on a house in south Lebanon’s Beit Yahun.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency said Wednesday that “an air strike launched by the Israeli enemy… on a house in Beit Yahun killed four people.” It did not identify the victims.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, when thousands of terrorists massacred some 1,200 people in Israel and took some 240 hostages, Israel’s northern front on the border with Lebanon has also been heating up. Daily exchanges of fire and attacks, with Hezbollah, Hamas and other terror groups, are raising fears of a broader conflagration.
Israel’s army said in statements Wednesday evening that it had struck a number of Hezbollah targets and sources of fire from Lebanon, including a Hezbollah “terrorist cell” and infrastructure.
Since the cross-border exchanges began, 107 people have been killed on the Lebanese side, according to an AFP tally. The toll also includes at least 14 civilians, three of them journalists.
Hezbollah announced on Wednesday the death of its 79th fighter killed since the war’s outbreak. Seven Hezbollah members have also been killed in Syria.
On the Israeli side, six soldiers and three civilians have been killed, according to authorities.
The strike came just hours after a four-day truce in Gaza was announced between Israel and Hamas, a key Hezbollah ally and also an Iranian proxy.
Hezbollah announced earlier on Wednesday that it will participate in the truce, even though it was not part of the negotiations between Israel and Hamas via the US and Qatar, host to Hamas’s political leadership in Doha.
In comments later Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had made no truce commitments regarding the northern border, and that Hezbollah would be judged “by its actions” rather than anything it said.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, on a visit to Beirut on Wednesday, warned in an interview that if the Hamas-Israel truce begins but “does not continue… the conditions in the region will not remain the same as before the ceasefire and the scope of the war will expand.”