An Israeli military helicopter flies over northern Israel near the border with Lebanon on November 2, 2023.Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters
Lebanon’s Hezbollah launched simultaneous attacks on Israeli military positions on the Lebanese border on Saturday, as residents of southern Lebanon reported the heaviest Israeli attacks yet in weeks of cross-border clashes. announced that he had gone.
The Israeli military said its warplanes attacked Hezbollah targets in response to the earlier attack from Lebanese territory, and airstrikes were accompanied by artillery and tank shelling.
A Lebanese source familiar with the Hezbollah attack said Hezbollah fired a powerful missile, which has not yet been used in combat, and hit Israeli positions across the border from the villages of Aita al-Shaab and Rumeik.
Hezbollah has been exchanging fire with Israeli forces across the Lebanon-Israel border since Palestinian ally Hamas went to war with Israel on October 7.
The frontier fighting is the worst since the 2006 war, but most of it is contained to border areas.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said Friday in his first speech since the start of the Hamas-Israel war that the escalation of the Lebanese front depends on events in Gaza and Israel’s actions against Lebanon. He also said Hezbollah’s previous border attacks were “not the whole story.”
The violence left nearly 60 Hezbollah fighters dead.
Lebanese security officials and witnesses reported what was the largest attack ever by Israel.
Two thick plumes of smoke can be seen rising over a hill near the Lebanese town of Qiyam in a video shared with Reuters by Qiyam resident Soheil Salami, who said the area had been hit by Israeli airstrikes. .
“Today’s shelling has become quite intense: shelling by the resistance and counter-shelling by the Israeli side,” Fuad Khurais also told Reuters from Qiyam. “Four shells fell on the outskirts of Qiyam, but no one was injured,” he said.
The Israeli military said that among the targets attacked were “terrorist infrastructure, rocket caches and compounds used by Hezbollah.”
Israel has said it is not interested in the conflict on its northern frontier. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month warned Hezbollah against opening a second front, saying doing so would result in an Israeli counterattack of “unimaginable” proportions that would bring “destruction” to Lebanon. .
