Hezbollah said it launched an attack on Israel “in response” to a deadly Israeli attack in southern Lebanon.
Beirut:
Hezbollah said it launched rockets into northern Israel on Thursday “in response” to a deadly Israeli strike in southern Lebanon – the group’s first attack after Israel killed a senior commander earlier this week.
The Iran-backed group said in a statement that it “launched dozens of Katyusha rockets… in response to the Israeli enemy’s attack on… (the southern village of Shama) that killed several civilians.”
The Israeli military said that shortly after the rocket launch, the Air Force “struck the Hezbollah launcher from which the projectiles were fired.”
Earlier Thursday, the Lebanese Health Ministry said four Syrians had been killed in an Israeli strike in the south, where Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged fire almost daily since the start of the war in Gaza in October.
“The Ministry of Health announces… that four Syrian citizens were martyred” in an “Israeli attack” on the village of Shama, in the south of the country, it said in a statement.
The ministry said the number could increase once DNA tests are carried out.
The attack also injured five Lebanese citizens, he added.
Emergency services told AFP that the dead were agricultural workers and were part of the same family.
Plumes of smoke billowed from the site of the attack, which seriously damaged two nearby buildings and burned a vehicle, a contributing photographer to AFP said.
The attack was Hezbollah’s first since an Israeli airstrike killed its top commander, Fuad Shukr, on Tuesday night, with leader Hassan Nasrallah saying operations would resume on Friday morning.
Nasrallah warned that his group would respond to Shukr’s murder.
His death was followed hours later on Wednesday by the assassination of Hezbollah-ally Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in an attack in Tehran that Iran and Hamas blamed on Israel. Israel refused to comment on his assassination.
Violence since October has killed at least 542 people on the Lebanese side, most of them combatants, but also 114 civilians, according to an AFP report.
At least 22 soldiers and 25 civilians were killed on the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, according to army data.
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