IDF Says Drone Strike Killed Soldier, Injured 13 in Southern Lebanon

Staff Sgt. Nir Ben Ari, 21, a Magen unit fighter from Kerem Maharal, was killed overnight between Friday and Saturday in Kfar Tebnit on the Ali Taher ridge in southern Lebanon. Thirteen others were wounded. The IDF also said it had cleared for publication that Staff Sgt. Yoav Klein, 21, from Herzliya, was one of the soldiers killed in Friday’s tank incident, while the names of two other dead soldiers from that event remain under wraps.

According to the military, the force from the Commando Brigade operating under Division 36 was hit directly by an explosive drone. Two soldiers were seriously wounded, one officer was moderately wounded, and 10 more soldiers were lightly wounded. Immediately after the incident, the IDF struck Hezbollah targets and infrastructure in the Nabatieh area.

The army says the tank team commanded by Lt. Col. Dor Ben Shimchon, commander of Battalion 52, died during an operation to seize a large underground Hezbollah network on the Ali Taher ridge. A senior IDF officer said the site includes several subterranean compounds, one more than a kilometer long and others hundreds of meters each. He described it as “a strategic infrastructure without precedent, the nervous system of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the main headquarters of Hezbollah’s Badr Unit.”

The IDF says dozens of militants are now trapped and surrounded in the underground complex, and that troops are fighting there against Hezbollah attempts to defend them. The army argues the operation does not violate the ceasefire because the ridge lies south of the yellow line. The same officer rejected reports that the tank was hit because of an operational malfunction, saying the initial inquiry points to a certain external strike, apparently an explosive drone with a warhead from an anti-tank missile.

The ridge is north of Kfar Tebnit, on the edge of Nabatieh district north of the Litani River, where Hezbollah has built strategic underground infrastructure over the years with Iranian funding and guidance. Fighting there has continued in recent days as Division 36 tries to capture the area. Three days earlier, Staff Sgt. Maj. (res.) Alexander Filin, 29, of Haifa, was killed when a bomb was detonated on the command post of Division 36’s deputy commander, leaving seven more soldiers wounded, including the deputy commander himself.