(Beirut) Lebanese Hezbollah claimed to have fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel on Thursday, in response to Israeli raids which left 15 dead, including a Hezbollah military official, on Wednesday in southern Lebanon.
Triggered in the wake of the war between Israel and Palestinian Hamas launched more than four months ago, the deadly exchanges of fire on the Israeli-Lebanese border between Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, and the Israeli army have intensified in recent years. last days.
“In a first response to the massacres in Nabatiyé and Sawaneh (regions of southern Lebanon), Islamic resistance fighters fired dozens of Katyusha-type rockets at 5:55 p.m. local time (10:55 a.m. Eastern time) Kyriat Shmona”, in northern Israel, bordering southern Lebanon, Hezbollah said in a statement.
PHOTO ARIEL SCHALIT, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Israeli bombings target southern Lebanon.
The powerful movement supported and armed by Iran, Israel’s sworn enemy, claimed responsibility earlier Thursday for a series of attacks against Israeli military positions near the border.
It also reported in three separate statements the death of three of its fighters in Israeli raids on Thursday, bringing the number of its members killed since Wednesday to eight.
On Wednesday evening, three members of Hezbollah, including a military official and seven civilians, members of the same family, were killed in an Israeli strike targeting a building in Nabatiyé.
Among them is Ali al-Debs, a military official who was injured on February 8 by an Israeli drone strike on his car in the same city, a Lebanese security source said Thursday.
The three members of Hezbollah were on the ground floor of the building, and the decimated family on the first floor, according to this source.
“Dangerous climbing”
The Israeli army confirmed in a statement that it had killed Ali al-Debs, whom it presented as “a commander of the Radwan forces”, an elite unit of Hezbollah, as well as “his deputy Ibrahim Issa, and another terrorist “.
An AFP photographer on site noted that the ground floor and first floor of the building had been blown away.
PHOTO MOHAMMED ZAATARI, ASSOCIATED PRESS
On Wednesday evening, three members of Hezbollah, including a military official and seven civilians, members of the same family, were killed in an Israeli strike targeting a building in Nabatiyé.
According to the official National Information Agency (ANI), “a drone equipped with a guided missile” targeted the building.
Rescuers removed the bodies of seven civilians, including five women and a child, from the rubble, according to ANI. A three-year-old child was pulled out alive and was hospitalized.
The UN has spoken of a “dangerous escalation” of violence which raises fears of a regional conflagration.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati condemned the “new massacres” of civilians by the “Israeli enemy”, particularly in Nabatiyé.
A spokesperson for the UN Interim Force deployed in southern Lebanon, Andrea Tenenti, urged in a statement “all parties concerned to immediately stop hostilities”.
Also on Wednesday, three civilians – a woman, her son and her son-in-law – were killed in an Israeli strike on the village of Sawaneh.
Nasrallah’s speech on Friday
A total of ten civilians were killed in Israeli strikes on Wednesday alone, the heaviest civilian death toll in more than four months of violence.
On the Israeli side, a soldier was killed Wednesday in a rocket attack from Lebanon which was not claimed.
Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah is due to deliver a new speech on Friday, the second this week.
In more than four months, at least 262 people, mostly fighters from Hezbollah and other allied groups but also 40 civilians, have been killed in southern Lebanon, according to an AFP count.
On the Israeli side, ten soldiers and six civilians were killed, according to the army.