(Bekaa Plain) Three people were injured by Israeli strikes overnight from Saturday to Sunday in the Baalbeck region, a Hezbollah stronghold in eastern Lebanon, an AFP correspondent reported, leading the Shiite party to retaliate.
“Earlier tonight, Israeli Defense Force fighter jets struck a production site containing weapons in the Baalbeck area,” the Israeli military said.
According to the AFP correspondent, “Israeli aircraft launched five missiles at a two-story inhabited building in al-Osseira, on the outskirts of Baalbeck.”
He added that the strikes targeted a Hezbollah center that had been deserted for a while, leaving three residents of nearby buildings injured.
The governor of the region Bachir Khodr also reported on the social network
Then, “in response to the bombing” in Baalbeck, Hezbollah said it had launched almost an hour later “more than sixty Katyusha-type rockets” on two Israeli military positions in the Syrian Golan occupied by Israel.
The Lebanese Islamist movement said it had targeted a base and a barracks serving as “headquarters of the air defense command, where members of the Golani brigade trained after returning from the Gaza Strip.”
The Israeli army reported having spotted “around 50 launches” from Lebanon “in the direction of northern Israel”, explaining that it had intercepted several of them and had struck several of the launchers involved using its aircraft.
Israel made no mention of any casualties or damage.
For several weeks, Israel has launched air raids deeper and deeper into Lebanese territory, against positions of the powerful Hezbollah, accentuating the threats of open war.
This is the third time, in more than five months of fighting between Hezbollah and the Israeli army, that the Baalbeck region has been targeted.
This strike, around a hundred kilometers from the Israeli-Lebanese border, comes after a relative calm of around ten days between the two belligerents.
On Saturday, Hezbollah announced that it had carried out several attacks on Israeli military positions, as has been the case daily since the start of cross-border violence on October 8, in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Pro-Iranian Hezbollah says it will only end its attacks on Israel if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.
In Lebanon, at least 323 people were killed, most of them Hezbollah fighters and at least 56 civilians, according to an AFP count.
The incessant exchanges of fire, which were initially confined to areas near the border, also displaced thousands of people in southern Lebanon, but also in northern Israel, where according to the army, ten soldiers and seven civilians died.
In late February, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned that a possible truce in Gaza would not undermine Israel’s “objective” of pushing Hezbollah from its northern border, by force or diplomacy.
For his part, the leader of the Shiite party estimated in mid-March that Israel was too weakened to launch into a war against Lebanon, the day after deadly Israeli strikes near Baalbeck.