An ISF member inspecting damage caused by an Israeli strike on a building in Wadi Jilo, east of Sour, on June 6, 2024. (Credit: Mahmoud Al-Zayyat/AFP)
As increasingly aggressive rhetoric regarding the potential for an “all-out war” between Hezbollah and Israel spreads across outlets in both countries, the Israeli army has targeted, for the first time since the start of the fighting, the southern Lebanese village of Wadi Jilo.
The Israeli airforce carried out multiple raids overnight into Thursday morning, striking almost a dozen different towns. The attack on Wadi Jiro stands out not just for being unprecedented, and not only for the scale of the damage caused by the strike — it also stands out because of what happened in the moments leading up to it.
Minutes before the three-story building housing a Jaber company warehouse was completely destroyed, along with neighboring houses, several residents of Wadi Jilo received warning messages on their phones.
"Good evening. Ibrahim here. I have urgent and important news. The two-story building opposite Ali's pharmacy in Wadi Jilo will be targeted in a few moments. It's about to blow up, evacuate everyone immediately!" reads the message written in Arabic and sent from an anonymous number starting with +45, a Danish telephone code.
Wadi Jilo resident Hussein Hijazi told our correspondent in the region that the message went out at 3:27 a.m. when Israeli jets were already in the skies about the village.
“I took it seriously because we could already hear the sound of planes overhead," he said. “I immediately evacuated my family when we heard an explosion near us, a projectile fired by an Israeli plane as a warning.”
Hijazi said ten minutes after receiving the message, Israeli warplanes attacked.
Several people living nearby had received similar messages on their phones, or phone calls, according to Hijazi.
A firefighter looks at the damage after dousing a fire the devoured the interior of a warehouse inside a building targeted by an Israeli airstrike in the southern Lebanese town of Wadi Jilo, east of Sour, on June 6, 2024. (Credit: Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP)
This is not the first time since the start of the war in southern Lebanon that residents have received this kind of warning prior to a strike. Last February, a resident of Khiam, in Marjayoun district, received a phone call from her "bank" asking her to go to the nearest branch to withdraw money, just before a neighboring house was destroyed by a bombardment. However, while these warning messages are not unheard of, they are rarely acted upon, especially with such immediacy.
Despite these warnings, rescue teams still evacuated four injured people who had been inside the targeted building. Two members of the Lebanese Civil Defense were also injured while fighting the flames of the fire caused by the strike.
The company that owns the building, a household appliance company called Jaber, lost "hundreds of thousands of dollars" worth of products in the bombing, it announced in a statement, in which it also praised the work of the rescue and ambulance crews who extinguished the fire and cleared the rubble.
The Israeli army claims to have targeted Hezbollah military sites during the night “including an arms depot in Wadi Jilo and two other sites near the Adsheet area,” according to a statement released by its Arabic-speaking spokesperson.
Additional reporting by Muntasser Abdallah.