by Antonio Graceffo – TheGatewayPundit.com
On June 2, 2026, an Israeli drone struck a car on the road linking Marjayoun with Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon, killing James Karam, a dentist from the nearby Christian town of Qlayaa, along with his daughter and son. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported the strike. Karam and his children were not combatants. They were Christians living in a village that had nothing to do with Hezbollah or its war with Israel, a war that was started without their consent and waged, in part, from their doorstep.
Qlayaa is a Maronite village. Maronites are Eastern Catholics in full communion with Rome and the largest Christian denomination in Lebanon. They trace their origin to the late 4th century, when a group of disciples gathered around the charismatic figure of the monk Saint Maron. As Islamic empires expanded, they retreated into the rugged mountains of Lebanon, carving villages into stone and transforming caves into chapels, where they survived in isolation for centuries. They have maintained a presence in Lebanon for roughly 1,600 years, and their patriarch secured the founding of the Lebanese state under the French Mandate in 1920.
Just three months earlier, in the same location, Father Pierre al-Rahi was killed. On March 9, the fifty-year-old Maronite Catholic priest was struck by Israeli tank fire while running toward the wounded in his village after a home was bombed. He had earlier refused, along with other priests, to obey an Israeli military order to evacuate Qlayaa, a village of some 8,000 inhabitants a few miles from the Israeli border.
A second strike hit immediately after the first, wounding him fatally. He died in the hospital. Three days before his death, Father Pierre had delivered a speech in front of his church welcoming the Lebanese government’s move to ban Hezbollah’s armed activity. “None of us carries weapons,” he told his congregation. Pope Leo XIV expressed “profound sorrow” for the victims of the bombings, citing Father Pierre by name.