BERIUT: A Lebanese security source said six Hezbollah fighters were killed in Israeli strikes on Tuesday, with the group claiming attacks in northern Israel and low-flying Israeli warplanes breaking the sound barrier over Beirut.
Since the Palestinian militant group's Oct. 7 attack on Israel sparked the war in Gaza, Hezbollah has engaged in an almost daily exchange of fire with Israel in support of its ally Hamas.
Tensions escalated last week as Iran and its allies vowed revenge for the killing, blamed on Israel, of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and after an Israeli strike killed Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Lebanon's Health Ministry said that “an Israeli enemy raid on a house in the town of Mayfadun,” near the southern city of Nabatiyeh, killed five people, while another Israeli attack in the Adaysseh area killed one person.
The victims in both places were “Hezbollah fighters,” a security source told AFP, requesting anonymity because the matter is sensitive.
Hezbollah announced that five fighters were killed, without specifying where they died.
The Israeli military said its air force “struck a Hezbollah military facility” in the Nabatiyeh area that was being used “to promote terrorist attacks” against Israel.
Hezbollah claimed several attacks on Israeli positions on Tuesday, including one using “explosive-laden drones” that targeted a barracks north of the coastal city of Acre.
The Israeli military said that “several hostile drones were identified as they crossed into Lebanon,” adding that “several civilians were injured south of Nahariya,” near Acre.
It later said that an initial investigation indicated that one of its interceptor missiles “missed its target and hit the ground, injuring several civilians,” adding that “the incident is under review.”
Israel's emergency service Magen David Adom said paramedics were treating “a 30-year-old man in serious condition and a 30-year-old woman in mild to moderate condition with shrapnel wounds.”
Hezbollah said the drone strike was a response to an airstrike on Monday in the southern village of Ebba that the Israeli military said targeted a commander in the group's elite Radwan Force.
Low-flying Israeli warplanes broke the sound barrier over Beirut on Tuesday, ahead of a speech by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, Lebanon's national news agency, a security source and AFP reporters reported.
Nasrallah was giving a televised speech a week after the killing of Shukr, whom Israel described as the group's “senior military commander” and Nasrallah's “right-hand man.”
Cross-border violence has killed some 556 people in Lebanon since October, according to a tally by the AFP news agency, most of them combatants, but at least 116 of them were civilians.
According to army data, on the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, 22 soldiers and 25 civilians were killed.
Diplomatic efforts have been stepped up in an attempt to avert a regional conflagration and all-out conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which last went to war in the summer of 2006.
