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Israel strikes Lebanon’s south, raising risks of escalation
Lebanon’s Hezbollah has exchanged near daily fire with Israeli since war erupted between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli strikes killed at least two people in Lebanon’s south on Wednesday evening, while Hamas fighters earlier fired a volley of rockets towards northern Israel from Lebanon amid escalating cross-border clashes in recent days.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah has exchanged near daily fire with the Israeli army since Tel Aviv launched a brutal war on Gaza on October 7. Palestinian groups in Lebanon have also occasionally claimed attacks. They have been demanding a ceasefire in Gaza where more than 30,000 people have been killed in four months of relentless Israeli bombardment.
“Enemy warplanes raided the towns of [Seddiqine] and Kafra… killing two people from the town of Kafra and injuring 14,” Lebanon’s state-run national news agency (NNA) said.
On Wednesday morning, Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades said in a statement it targeted two Israeli military sites with two barrages of Grad rockets.
The attack from south Lebanon came in “response to Zionist massacres against civilians in the Gaza Strip and the assassination of martyred leaders and their brothers in the southern suburbs” of Beirut, the statement added.
The Israeli military said in a statement that “approximately 10 launches which crossed from Lebanon into northern Israel were identified”, adding that sirens had sounded in north Israel’s Kiryat Shmona area.
Air defences “successfully intercepted a number of the launches”, the statement said, adding that the army “struck the sources of the fire in Lebanon”.
Israeli police reported property damage in the Kiryat Shmona area but no wounded.
A strike in January, which a United States defence official said was carried out by Israel, killed Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri and six others in south Beirut – the most high-profile Hamas figure to be killed during the war.
The escalating cross-border exchanges since October 8 have stoked fears of all-out war on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
The exchanges have killed at least 286 people on the Lebanese side.
On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and six civilians have been killed, according to the Israeli army.
Thousands of people from border regions have been displaced due to the exchanges.
