The Israeli army and Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, have again traded fire across the border.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah on Tuesday launched a drone attack on an Israeli command base. Israel retaliated with air strikes, while it is also reported to have killed three Hezbollah members in a targeted strike. The rise in attacks across the Israel-Lebanon border is stoking fear that the war in Gaza threatens to spark a regional conflagration.
Hezbollah said that it had targeted the “enemy’s northern command centre in the city of Safed with several drones” in retaliation for the killing of Hezbollah field commander Wissam al-Tawil in Lebanon on Monday, as well as an attack on Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut last week.
Al-Tawil was the deputy head of a unit in the elite Radwan force and is the highest Hezbollah fighter to be killed in the fighting since the war on Gaza began on October 7.
Al-Arouri was killed in a drone strike, presumably by Israel, on January 2 in Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold.
The Israeli air force said it had intercepted a number of the Hezbollah drones before they reached their target. Videos show that at least one made it through. Planes then attacked the location from which the drones were launched.
media’s Laura Khan, reporting from Israel’s northern border town of Shlomi, said sirens had sounded for several hours across the 120km (75 miles) border between Lebanon and Israel.
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