Smoke billows following Israeli bombardment in in southern Lebanon on St Valentine’s Day February 14 , 2024
Beirut- Israel’s military said it was responding to rocket fire from Lebanon, which had reportedly killed one woman and injured several people.
A woman and two children are reported to be among four people killed in a wave of Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon.
Security sources told the Reuters news agency the deaths came during Israeli strikes on a village.
Eleven people were wounded across southern areas and the level of damage was “vast”, the sources said.
Lebanon’s powerful armed group Hezbollah said a strike on a separate town killed one of its fighters.
Media reports in Lebanon said buildings were on fire after the attacks by Israel.
The strikes come after reports a woman had died and other people were injured in a rocket attack on northern Israel.
Israel’s military said its attacks were in response to the rocket fire.
Hezbollah is thought to be behind the initial rocket attack, but has not claimed responsibility.
The strike launched from inside Lebanon hit a military base and wounded several people on Wednesday, according to an Israeli government spokesperson.
In a statement, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said: “A short while ago, IDF fighter jets struck a series of Hezbollah terror targets in the areas of Jabal el Braij, Houneh, Dunin, Aadchit and Souaneh.
“Among the targets struck were military compounds, operational control rooms, and terror infrastructure used by Hezbollah terrorists.
“Several targets belonged to the Redwan Forces.”
Cross-border shelling has already killed more than 200 people in Lebanon, including more than 170 Hezbollah fighters, as well as around a dozen Israeli troops and some Israeli civilians.
It has also displaced tens of thousands of people in the border areas of each country.
The rocket attack from Lebanon was the second in two days to cause casualties in northern Israel and was the latest in months of tit-for-tat strikes across the border that have fueled fears about a wider war as Israel battles Hamas in Gaza.
Benny Gantz, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s emergency war cabinet, described the morning’s rocket attack as “a difficult event for which the response will come soon and powerfully.” He suggested that Israel could strike at Lebanese military targets in addition to those belonging to Hezbollah.
“It is important that we be clear — the one responsible for the fire from Lebanon is not only Hezbollah or the terrorist elements that carry it out, but also the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese state that allows the shooting from its territory,” Gantz said, adding: “There is no target or military infrastructure in the area of the north and Lebanon that is not in our sights.”
The latest strikes threatened to derail diplomatic efforts by the United States and others to defuse the cross-border tensions. A Western diplomat said on Tuesday that France had presented a proposal to Israel, Lebanon’s government and Hezbollah. The French proposal details a 10-day process of de-escalation and calls for Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters to a distance of 10 kilometers (six miles) from Lebanon’s border with Israel, according to the diplomat, who is involved in the talks and who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations.
But Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah rejected the proposal and said it serves Israeli interests only
Avigdor Liberman, a former top adviser to Netanyahu who now leads an opposition party, accused the government of waving a “white flag” at Hezbollah by failing to take strong enough steps to stop the rocket attacks.
“The war cabinet surrendered to Hezbollah and lost the north,” he wrote on social media on Wednesday.
Israel’s military said that rockets from Lebanon had landed in the areas of Netu’a, Manara and a military base in northern Israel. In Safed, a city of nearly 40,000 people that has four military bases nearby, according to Tamir Engel, a spokesman for the city, rocket warnings are not uncommon but fatalities and direct hits are rare.
In early January, Hezbollah fired rockets toward a small military base not far from the city. The group said then that it was retaliating for the assassination days earlier of a senior Hamas commander in Lebanon; Israel said at the time that the attack had caused no casualties.
Safed sits about eight miles south of the border with Lebanon, far enough away that it was not included in mandatory evacuation orders issued when cross-border hostilities flared after the deadly Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
Israel and Hezbollah have engaged in near-daily cross-border strikes ever since. The clashes have displaced more than 150,000 people from their homes on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border.
SKY NEWS/ NY TIMES
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