Five IDF reservists killed in rocket attack on troops in southern Lebanon; 19 injured
IDF says Hezbollah elite force regional commander killed in recent strike, tunnels demolished in south Lebanon; 3 journalists from pro-Hezbollah news outlets killed overnight
Five Israeli reserve soldiers were killed during fighting with Hezbollah operatives in southern Lebanon on Thursday night and 19 others were wounded, some of them seriously, the IDF said on Friday,
The slain IDF reservists were named as:
- Maj. (res.) Dan Maori, 43, from Beit Yitzhak-Sha’ar Hefer.
- Cpt. (res.) Alon Safrai, 28, from Jerusalem.
- Warrant Officer (res.) Omri Lotan, 47, from Bat Hefer.
- Warrant Officer (res.) Guy Idan, 51, from Shomrat.
- Master Sgt. (res.) Tom Segal, 28, from Ein HaBesor.
They all served with the 8th Armored Brigade’s 89th Battalion, of which Maori was deputy commander.
According to an initial IDF probe, Hezbollah operatives inside a southern Lebanese village attacked the building in which the troops were accepting logistics supplies.
A barrage of rockets was fired at the meeting point for the supply of equipment, one of which hit near the building where the soldiers were standing.
Members of the logistics convoy were also hurt.
Among the 19 injured, four soldiers were listed in serious condition.
The wounded reservists, along with another reservist who was seriously injured in fighting in south Lebanon on Friday morning, were evacuated to hospitals for treatment.
Idan was the cousin of Tsahi Idan, who is being held hostage by Hamas in Gaza after he was abducted from his home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7, Israeli journalist and October 7 survivor Amir Tibon wrote on X.
Having already reached the age where he was no longer required for reserve duty, Idan had volunteered to serve.
“[Guy] won’t get to see [Tsahi] come home from captivity in Gaza,” a relative told the Ynet news site.
Amid the fighting in southern Lebanon, where troops have been working to push back Hezbollah forces from the border to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from northern communities, the IDF said on Friday that two Hezbollah tunnels were recently demolished by combat engineers.
The sites were located by reservists with the Carmeli Brigade.
One of the tunnels, which served as an underground command center, was located dozens of meters below a Lebanese village. The IDF said that several Hezbollah operatives were holed up in the site and were killed.
Another tunnel, found by troops close to the border, served as a weapons depot for Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, and would have been used in a planned invasion of Israel, the military said.
It added that both of the tunnels were demolished.
Separately, the military said that reservists seized dozens of Hezbollah weapons during their operation in southern Lebanon, including 11 trucks packed with anti-tank missiles, launchers, grenades, and assault rifles.
Three journalists killed in overnight airstrike
Overnight in southeast Lebanon, Lebanese media outlets said three journalists were killed and several others were wounded in an Israeli airstrike near the Syrian border, an incident that the country’s information minister branded as a “war crime.”
The pro-Hezbollah Al-Mayadeen news outlet said that camera operator Ghassan Najar and broadcast technician Mohammed Rida were killed while the Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar TV said camera operator Wissam Qassim was killed in the airstrike on the Hasbaya region.
There was no immediate comment from the IDF on the incident.
The strike targeted a group of bungalows in Hasbaya that had been rented out by several media outlets for field reporters covering the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, local media outlets reported.
Local news station Al Jadeed aired footage showing collapsed buildings and cars marked “PRESS,” covered in dust and rubble.
Reporters from other media organizations including Al-Jadeed, Sky News Arabic and Al Jazeera English were also in the bungalows at the time of the strike.
Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary accused Israel of deliberately targeting the journalists in their sleep.
“The Israeli enemy waited for the journalists’ nighttime break to betray them in their sleep,” he wrote on X. “This is an assassination, after monitoring and tracking, with prior planning and design, as there were 18 journalists there representing seven media institutions. This is a war crime.”
Moments after the strike, Al-Manar correspondent Ali Shoeib, who is known for trying to provoke Israeli soldiers from across the border during peace times, was seen in a video filming himself with a cellphone saying that the camera operator who had been working with him for months had been killed.
Hasbaya is home to both Christians and Muslims and is not considered a traditional Hezbollah stronghold. While there have been attacks on its outskirts in recent weeks, the strike in the early hours of Friday morning was the first on the town itself.
“We heard the airplane flying very low — that’s what woke us up — and then we heard the two missiles,” Muhammad Farhat, a reporter with the independent Lebanese outlet Al-Jadeed, told Reuters.
“We had been reporting from there for about a month without anything happening. I don’t even know how I climbed out from under the rubble,” Farhat said.
The incident followed a strike the previous night that had targeted an office used by Al-Mayadeen in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Elsewhere in Lebanon, the IDF said on Friday morning that the commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force in southern Lebanon’s Aitaroun region had been killed in a recent airstrike.
Abbas Adnan Moslem, according to the military, was responsible for numerous rocket attacks from the Aitaroun area on troops and Israeli towns.
In total, the IDF said it had carried out strikes against some 200 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon over the past day.
Across the border in Syria, a strike carried out by the IDF put a border crossing between Lebanon and Syria out of service.
The crossing is the second to have been hit in an airstrike after one was also targeted in late September. As a result, just one official passage between the two countries remains operational.
Lebanon’s Transport Minister Ali Hamieh, who is a member of Hezbollah’s political arm, confirmed that “The Qaa crossing has been put out of service after an Israeli strike on Syrian territory, hundreds of meters from Syrian border guards.”
The military confirmed carrying out an airstrike, saying that Hezbollah had exploited the Syrian-run Jusiyah Crossing, located in the northern Beqaa Valley close to the Lebanese town of Qaa, for the transfer of weapons into Lebanon.
The military released footage of the strikes, which it said targeted Hezbollah infrastructure at the crossing.
The IDF said Hezbollah’s Unit 4400 was behind the smuggling efforts.
Israel has struck several other crossings between Lebanon and Syria in recent months, amid efforts by Iran to supply Hezbollah with weapons.
Sirens sounded in communities across northern Israel on Friday morning, including in Caesarea, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence is located.
The IDF said that one missile was launched from Lebanon and was successfully intercepted by air defenses.
In a separate incident, sirens were activated in the Haifa area, and in Acre and surrounding towns and villages, when a barrage of five rockets was launched from Lebanon.
The military said some of the rockets were intercepted, while others struck open areas. There were no reports of injuries as a result of the rocket fire.
A drone that crossed into Israeli airspace from Syria was also shot down by air defenses over the southern Golan Heights after it triggered sirens in several towns in the Golan and near the Sea of Galilee.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.
Some 60,000 residents were evacuated from northern towns on the Lebanon border shortly after Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, amid fears Hezbollah would carry out a similar attack, and increasing rocket fire by the terror group.
The attacks on northern Israel since October 2023 have resulted in the deaths of 29 civilians. In addition, 55 IDF soldiers and reservists have died in cross-border skirmishes and in the ensuing ground operation launched in southern Lebanon in late September.
Two soldiers have been killed in a drone attack from Iraq, and there have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
The IDF estimates that more than 2,000 Hezbollah operatives have been killed in the conflict. Around 100 members of other terror groups, along with hundreds of civilians, have also been reported killed in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has named 516 members who have been killed by Israel amid the fighting, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. These numbers have not been consistently updated since Israel stepped up its offensive against Hezbollah in September.
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