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Incident Date
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Airwars Assessment
One woman was killed in an airstrike on the morning of September 27, 2024. Allegedly perpetrated by the Israeli military, the strike hit the town of Ghaziyeh, near Sidon in the south of Lebanon.
At 7:12 AM, a number of tweets announcing an air raid on the town of Ghaziyeh were published by various Palestinian news sources, including, but not limited to @F24online (Palestine Daily Newspaper), @qudsn (Quds News Network), and @Sa7atPl (a Palestinian journalistic platform). Initial reports were later corroborated by video footage from Asas Media, which depicted buildings with their external walls crumbled by the force of the blast, and mounds of rubble lining the streets.
The deceased was identified by the Bint Jbeil community as being Zainab Abdel Moneim al-Saghir (Umm Muhammad), who had been displaced to Ghaziyeh during the war. A memorial post by Fouad Esseily on Facebook described her as having been “kind-hearted” and “an innocent smiler”, and revealed that her parents and sister were also deceased before.
Dearborn Site shared information for a commemoration service in honour of Zainab, to be held on Saturday, October 5, 2024. The announcement remembered Zainab as the member of a close family. Zainab was the “beloved wife of Bilal” and the couple had three children: MOhamad, Hussein, and Malak.
Zainab is survived by six siblings and joins a seventh, Sahar, in death. She’s also survived by three siblings-in-law: Samir, Ghassan, and Mohamad.
An Instagram post shared by the dearborn_news account shared images of many people gathered at the Bint Jbeil Cultural Center in Dearborn, Michigan to “commemorate the one-week anniversary of the martyrdom of a group of martyrs from Bint Jbeil”, including Zainab. Six other individuals were remembered, including: the late Hajj Ali Habib Dabaja, Bilal Tafrik Saad, Batoul Amin Dabaja Saad, Fatima Al-Zahra Bilal Saad, Ali Bilal Saad, Muhammad Hassan Bilal Saad, and Hajja Amal Fayez.
Many sources shared an image of the late Zainab, a middle-aged woman in a beige hijab.
On September 29, Facebook user Bint Jabeiloun shared an image of three coffins shrouded in what appears to be a Hezbollah coffin cover. The post included the caption: “Bint Jbeil bids farewell to the martyrs… Sayyida Zeinab Al-Saghir, Rabih Harb, and Hassan Darwish”.
While Hezbollah operates an active militant wing, their political presence is also deeply enmeshed within the state, providing social and organisational services, primarily in the Shiaa majority areas in Southern Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley, and the suburbs of Beirut. With this context in mind, and given that there are no indications of militant activities, the presence of the Hezbollah coffin cover cannot alone be used to determined if an individual or community is affiliated with the Hezbollah’s armed wing, or that there was a militant presence in the area. As such, Zainab has been recorded as a civilian. This will be updated should additional information become available.
In researching Rabih and Hassan, Airwars found that both men were likely militants affiliated with Hezbollah. In a tribute video to Rabih shared by the Al-Alam Channel, Rabih’s martyr photo dates his death to September 28 – the day after the incident in which Zainab was reportedly killed. As posts like that shared by Imad Bazzi on September 28 announced the deaths of Rabih and Hassan together, their militant status and deaths have not been included in this incident. This will be updated should additional information become available.
Where sources identified belligerents, all sources attributed the airstrike to the Israeli military.