Lebanese state media said an Israeli strike in south Lebanon on Friday killed a first responder from a rescue group affiliated with a Hezbollah-allied movement and a telecoms technician doing maintenance work.
Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, have exchanged near-daily cross-border fire following the Palestinian group’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked war in Gaza.
A Risala Scout association rescuer and a technician from Power Tec, which undertakes maintenance work for private mobile service provider MTC Touch, were killed “as a result of the Israeli aggression on Tayr Harfa”, Lebanon’s National News Agency said.
Workers from MTC Touch and the Ogero telecom provider were carrying out “maintenance on the transmission poles”, the NNA said, adding they had sought permission from the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, or UNIFIL.
The Risala Scout association affiliated with the Amal movement, which operates rescue teams in south Lebanon, said the rescuer was killed when his team went to a location that had come under Israeli bombardment.
“The second strike came quickly, and one of the young men was martyred,” a source from the association told AFP.
A source within MTC Touch said the strike hit a team that had been doing maintenance work in Tayr Haifa.
“We lost communications with them because the station was hit,” the source told AFP, requesting anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.
“There were people from our team and from another company that does maintenance work for us, and there were also paramedics,” the source added.
At least 402 people have been killed in Lebanon in seven months of cross-border violence, mostly militants but also including 79 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
Israel says 14 soldiers and nine civilians have been killed on its side of the border. Three of the soldiers were killed this week, one of them on Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides.
