American killed by Israeli air raid in Lebanon, friends and family say

A 56-year-old American man was killed during an Israeli air strike in Lebanon as Israel Defense Forces continue a military campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah, according to his loved ones.

Services for Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a Lebanese American father of four, are being held in Dearborn, Michigan, this week.

Jawad “was a respected figure whose impact on the lives of many will not be forgotten,” a “man of service” and “one of the kindest and most generous humans,” according to memorials from friends and family members posted to social media.

Friends report that Jawad was staying in Nabatieh, Lebanon, and had protected his nephew under Israeli airstrikes before he was killed on Tuesday.

The Independent has requested comment from the Department of State.

Israeli airstrikes and military actions in Lebanon have killed more than 1,000 people, including dozens of children, and displaced a fifth of the population and wounded several thousand others, within the last two weeks, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.

Israel announced on Tuesday that eight soldiers were killed in combat in a first wave of ground battles, the first in the region since Israel’s month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006.

Another series of 180 missiles fired by Iran into Israel on Tuesday were largely intercepted by Israel with US support. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said late Tuesday that the attack was in response to the assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran in July.

Iran’s mission at the United Nations said the attack was a “legal, rational, and legitimate response to the terrorist acts of the Zionist regime,” in the wake of Israel’s year-long retaliatory assault on Gaza, where more than 41,600 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group, laid the blame for Jawad’s death on President Joe Biden’s administration and US support for Israel in its campaign in Lebanon.

“Every member of the Biden administration’s foreign policy team should be ashamed of themselves for enabling Israel’s war crimes against American citizens and countless other civilians,” the group said in a statement. “We do not expect this feckless and complicit administration to do anything to hold Kemal’s killers accountable, and we are done asking them to treat American Muslims killed overseas like human beings worthy of US protection. Shame on them. That is all we can say.”