BINT JBEIL, Lebanon (AP) \u2014 A village in southern Lebanon on Tuesday buried five people, including three children and their father, killed in an Israeli strike over the weekend.<\/p>\n
Shadi Charara, a car dealer, was killed while driving home to the southern seaside city of Tyre on Sunday with his wife and four children after having lunch at his father-in-law\u2019s house in the town of Bint Jbeil, a few kilometers from the border with Israel. <\/p>\n
Sam Bazzi, the children\u2019s maternal grandfather, told The Associated Press the family thought they were safe because they had no affiliation with Hezbollah. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re regular citizens and we don\u2019t belong to any group,\u201d Bazzi said. \u201cAnd so we thought we had nothing to do with it and we were just living normally, coming and going.\u201d<\/p>\n
The family was only a few hundred meters from Bazzi\u2019s house when a motorcycle passed by, and at the same moment, the Israeli drone struck. <\/p>\n
It killed Charara, his twin 18-month-old son and daughter Hadi and Silan, 8-year-old daughter Celine, and the motorcyclist, a local man named Mohammed Majed Mroue. Family members said Mroue was Charara\u2019s cousin but had been passing by chance at the time of the strike, not traveling with the family.<\/p>\n
The children\u2019s mother, Amina Bazzi, and her oldest daughter, Asil, survived but were seriously wounded. Bazzi, her face bruised and swollen, was carried on a stretcher through the crowd at the funeral of her husband and children.<\/p>\n
After Sunday\u2019s strike, the Israeli military said it was targeting a Hezbollah<\/a> militant, whom it did not name, and that he \u201coperated from within a civilian population.\u201d It acknowledged that civilians were killed and said that it was reviewing the incident. <\/p>\n At the funeral in Bint Jbeil, the coffins were draped in Lebanese flags, and only Lebanese flags were waving in the crowd. At other funerals in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah banners are often on display.<\/p>\n A U.S.-brokered ceasefire<\/a> halted the latest Israel-Hezbollah war<\/a> in November. That conflict began on Oct. 8, 2023, when Hezbollah began firing rockets across the border, one day after a deadly Hamas-led incursion into southern Israel sparked the war in Gaza<\/p>\n Israel responded with shelling and airstrikes in Lebanon, and the two sides became locked in an escalating conflict that became a full-blown war in September 2024. <\/p>\n