BEIRUT — An Israeli airstrike on eastern Lebanon has killed a number of people, including a senior member of a Palestinian terror group and his bodyguard as they were on their way to Syria, news reports and his group said Friday.
The Thursday afternoon airstrike near the Lebanese border crossing of Masnaa killed Mohammed Wishah, a member of the central committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the group said in a statement.
Separately, Lebanese media reported Friday that the IDF drone had struck a vehicle in Ansariyeh, located between Tyre and Sidon in southern Lebanon.
According to the reports, one person was killed in the strike. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) named the fatality as citizen journalist Mohammed Shehadeh. According to The Associated Press, Hezbollah later said Shehadeh was one of its members.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on either strike.
Senior PFLP official Marwan Abdel-Al mourned the death of Wishah and his bodyguard, Mufid Hussein, in a post on social media. “We have lost two of the most loyal comrades who gave their precious souls to freedom,” Abdel-Al wrote.
NNA said the Thursday airstrike on eastern Lebanon killed six people and wounded 10, without identifying the victims.
Since the Israel-Hamas war began with the terror group’s October 2023 onslaught, Israel has targeted Palestinian terror operatives in Lebanon, including PFLP members. Three PFLP members were killed in an airstrike on a Beirut apartment last September.
A PFLP official said Wishah had been in Lebanon to meet with other officials with the group and was on his way back to Syria when the airstrike happened. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorized to speak to the media.
The PFLP statement said Wishah was born in the Gaza Strip in 1954 and spent five years in Israeli jails shortly after he joined the Palestinian terror group in 1973.
For many years, the leftist and secular PFLP has been the second-largest member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah group.
On October 8, 2023, a day after the Hamas onslaught, Hezbollah started, unprovoked, to send rockets toward Israeli cities on a daily basis, sparking a 14-month war that ended late last year with a ceasefire, with the Iran-backed terror group severely weakened. The Lebanese government this week adopted a motion calling for Hezbollah to be disbanded.
Since the truce was reached, Israel has carried out scores of airstrikes on Lebanon, mainly targeting Hezbollah members, saying they were violating the ceasefire.