A French soldier who was gravely wounded in an attack on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon last week has succumbed to his wounds, President Emmanuel Macron has said.
Another French peacekeeper was killed in the incident and two more were injured; their patrol came under small-arms fire in the village of Ghandourieh in southern Lebanon on Saturday, according to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
In a post on X on Wednesday, Macron said that one of the wounded troops, Chief Corporal Anicet Girardin, who had been evacuated to France a day earlier, had died.
The president expressed his condolences to Girardin’s relatives and to the families of the other servicemen injured in the attack, which he blamed on the Lebanese movement Hezbollah.
Hezbollah said in a statement on Saturday that it “denies any connection to the incident,” calling for “caution in making judgments and assigning responsibilities” pending an investigation by the Lebanese military.
The group has been involved in heavy fighting with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). West Jerusalem invaded southern Lebanon less than a week after the US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Earlier in April, US President Donald Trump announced that the sides had agreed to a ten-day truce, which expires on Sunday.
More than 2,300 people have been killed and over 1.2 million have been displaced due to the fighting on the ground and IDF airstrikes in Lebanon, according to the authorities in Beirut.
A total of three French troops have lost their lives in the current Middle East conflict. One soldier also died and several more were wounded in a drone strike on a French-Kurdish base in northern Iraq in mid-March.
At the moment, some 700 French troops are deployed in Lebanon as part of the UNIFIL, which includes 7,505 peacekeepers from 47 nations.
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Paris, which has lasting political and economic ties with Beirut, has been stationing its peacekeepers in Lebanon since 1978. More than 160 French troops have been killed in the country since then.
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