SIDON, Lebanon — An Israeli airstrike hit two vehicles near a Lebanese army checkpoint in southern Lebanon on Sunday, killing a member of Hezbollah and injuring several others, including civilians, state media and Lebanese health officials reported.
The attack appears to be part of Israel’s strategic shift toward targeted killings in Lebanon after more than three months of near-daily clashes with Hezbollah militants on the border against the backdrop of the war in Gaza.
Hezbollah announced that one of its members, identified as Fadel Shaar, had been killed in an attack in the city of Kafra. Civil defense officials and local hospitals said seven people were injured, including two women, one of whom was in critical condition.
Video from the scene shows a burning passenger sedan next to a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road.
The Israeli army did not comment on the attack.
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, Hezbollah forces have engaged in almost daily clashes with Israeli forces along the border.
While previous fighting was mainly confined to a narrow strip within a few miles of the border, Israel in recent weeks appears to have switched to a strategy of targeted assassinations of figures from Hezbollah and allied groups, sometimes striking areas quite far from the border, such as which happened in the strike on Sunday.
A Lebanese army officer stands next to a destroyed car in the southern city of Bazouriyeh, Lebanon, on Saturday. AP
On Saturday, another strike near the Lebanese port city of Tire killed two people in a car – one of them a Hezbollah commander – and two people in a nearby orchard. The commander, Ali Hudruj, was buried Sunday in southern Lebanon. Another passenger in the car, technology sector businessman Mohammad Baqir Diab, was identified as a civilian and was buried in Beirut on Sunday.
On January 2, an Israeli air strike believed to have killed a top Hamas official, Saleh Arouri, in the suburbs of Beirut, the first such attack in the Lebanese capital since Israel and Hezbollah fought a brutal month-long war in 2006.
Speaking at Hudruj’s funeral Sunday, Hezbollah MP Hussein Jeshi said Israel had “made a method of killing some members of the resistance” to compensate for not being able to achieve a military victory against Hamas after more than 100 days of war in Gaza.
The Lebanese militant group said in a statement later Sunday that it had launched an attack on the northern Israeli town of Avivim in retaliation for a civilian woman killed in an Israeli attack in Kafra and for “other attacks targeting Lebanese villages and civilians.”
The attack killed a Hezbollah member. AP
It later modified the statement to remove references to civilian deaths after hospital officials and family members said the woman was still alive.
Israel did not comment on the attack in Kafra but announced it had struck Hezbollah targets in several locations in Lebanon on Sunday. It later said that an anti-tank missile had hit a house in Avivim and no injuries were reported.
With the danger of a regional conflict spreading on multiple fronts, officials from the United States and Europe have engaged in a flurry of diplomatic back-and-forth in recent weeks between Israel and Lebanon, trying to avoid escalating the conflict into a full-scale war on the Lebanese front.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
