Geneva, October 16 (RHC)-- The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights says reports indicate many of the victims of an Israeli airstrike on a mainly Christian-populated area in northern Lebanon were women and children.

At least 21 people were killed on Monday in the Israeli airstrike on the town of Aitou, Lebanon’s Zgharta district, according to the health ministry and the Lebanese Red Cross.

Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah has vowed to defend the innocent people of Palestine and Lebanon against the Israeli barbarism.

Jeremy Laurence, spokesman of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told a Geneva news briefing, “We understand it was a four-storey residential building that was struck. With these factors in mind, we have real concerns with respect to IHL [international humanitarian law], so the laws of war and the principles of distinction proportion and proportionality.”

[ SOURCE:  PRESS TV ]