At least one dead in Hezbollah anti-tank rocket attack

Of the seven others wounded, two are in serious condition and four others were hurt moderately.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

One man was killed and seven wounded, two seriously, in a Hezbollah anti-tank rocket attack on northern Israel Monday.

The dead man is a Thai citizen in his thirties who was found by Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency personnel in the orchard he was working in in the upper Galilee moshav of Margaliot.

All the wounded are also Thai agricultural workers. Most of them suffered from shrapnel wounds, the MDA said.

“Using an MDA bullet-proof intensive care vehicle, we arrived near the place where the anti-tank missile fire occurred and retrieved the wounded from there,” said senior medic Yigal Ben Udiz and paramedic Walid Kezel, who took care of five men together with IDF medics.

MDA paramedic Eli Asulin reported separately that both wounded men he bandaged and treated at a nearby junction were in their thirties as well.

“One of the wounded was defined as being in serious condition, fully conscious and suffering from a serious injury to his face and shrapnel throughout his body,” he said.

All the victims except for the lightly wounded man were taken by helicopter to hospitals in Haifa and Petach Tikva. The lightly injured worker was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Tiberius.

The medical service added that they are continuing to search for more possible victims in the area.

Sitting almost on the Lebanon-Israeli border, Margaliot has been a frequent target for Hezbollah’s short-range airborne attacks. An anti-tank missile’s range is up to eight kilometers.

One expert on Thai workers in Israel said that the death was a “foreknown tragedy.”

“Foreign agricultural workers, Thai citizens, continue to be abandoned in the war,” charged Dr. Yahel Kurlander of the Tel Hai College. “The death of the worker and the injury of many others today in Margaliot was a foreknown tragedy.”

“The army does not have any information about how many workers from Thailand are in the evacuated settlements,” she added. “There is no one who makes sure that they receive protection and reliable information about the situation except civil society organizations.”

While all the border villages in the north were officially evacuated shortly after the Israel-Hamas war began and Hezbollah began raining rockets over the border from Lebanon, there are still a number of people there who cannot afford to abandon their farms, barns, orchards or chicken coops.

Although most foreign workers left after Hamas invaded Israel’s south on October 7 and murdered at least 39 Thais among the 1,200 massacred in their attack, an unknown number have remained.

Two weeks after the Israel-Hamas war began in October, a Hezbollah squad shot a similar anti-tank missile at Margaliot and was almost immediately eliminated by a missile fired from an IAF jet. In that incident, two Thai workers were injured, one moderately and one lightly.

According to Lobby 1701, a forum of northern citizens who count Hezbollah attacks, Hezbollah fired at least 688 missiles of various kinds at Israel in February alone.