Hezbollah fires rockets after Israeli attack on Lebanon

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel on Saturday after an Israeli airstrike killed two civilians in the south of the country, according to a Lebanese security source.

The Israeli military, whose forces have been engaged in regular cross-border shelling with Hezbollah since early October, said its attack targeted two members of the Iran-backed group.

The Shiite movement said it fired dozens of rockets at the border town of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel in retaliation.

The Israeli military said four soldiers were injured, one of them “seriously”, after air defenses intercepted most of the “approximately 15 launches … that came from Lebanon”.

Israeli aircraft then “hit a Hezbollah field commander operating in the (Kfar) Tebnit area in southern Lebanon,” the military added.

The official Lebanese news agency NNA reported several injuries in an Israeli drone attack on a vehicle near Kfar Tebnit.

Hezbollah had already launched several attacks on Israeli military positions along the border on Saturday.

The Lebanese security source, who wished to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that “two civilians were fetching water from a roadside spring” in the Deir Mimas region of southern Lebanon when they were killed in an “Israeli airstrike.”

A source close to Hezbollah, who also wished to remain anonymous, said one of the men was a member of the group and the father of a fighter who was killed, while the second man was a member of the Hezbollah-allied Amal movement.

The two were “civilians, not combatants,” the source added.

An Israeli army statement said that “soldiers identified two Hezbollah fighters preparing to fire missiles into Israeli territory in the Deir Mimas area of ​​southern Lebanon.”

“Soon after identification, the IAF (air force) attacked the militants,” the statement added.

Hezbollah said it fired the rockets “in response to the Israeli enemy’s aggression against the villages … and civilian population in the south.”

Since the Palestinian group’s attack on Israel on October 7 triggered the war in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah has been engaged in almost daily exchanges of fire with Israeli forces in support of its ally Hamas.

The NNA said a “hostile drone” killed two men in the same area on Saturday. One of them was identified as a member of the Amal movement’s local council in the nearby village of Kfar Kila.

It was said that they had collected water from the spring “to use for the livestock in Kfar Kila”.

The Amal movement announced in a statement that one of its members born in 1964 had been murdered.

In Lebanon, according to an AFP count, more than 500 people have been killed in cross-border violence since October, most of them fighters, but also more than 90 civilians.

On the Israeli side, at least 29 people were killed, most of them soldiers, according to authorities.

The violence is largely confined to the border region and raises fears of an open conflict between the two warring parties, who last fought each other in the summer of 2006.