The Lebanese Ministry of Health announced today that at least nine people, including a woman and her two children, were killed in an Israeli strike in the Nabatieh sector in the south of the country.
According to the ministry, five people were also wounded in the attack, and two are in critical condition.
This is one of the deadliest attacks in more than ten months of violence on the Israeli-Lebanese border between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Israeli army.
The Israeli army announced that overnight it hit a Hezbollah weapons depot in the Nabatieh area, as well as the Lebanese movement’s military facilities in the Hanin and Marun El Ras areas, near the border.
Pro-Iranian Hezbollah opened a front against Israel on October 8 in that border sector to support Palestinian Hamas, its ally in the war against Israel in the Gaza Strip since October 7 last year.
The near-daily exchange of fire since then between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Israeli military has intensified with the death in late July of a Hezbollah military leader who was killed in an Israeli strike in Beirut, a day before the killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran, which Iran and its allies attribute to Israel.
Tehran and Hezbollah have threatened Israel with retaliation, sparking fears of a regional military escalation that international diplomacy is trying to avert as it renews efforts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza, where war began on October 7 following an unprecedented Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Negotiations on the truce should continue next Sunday in Cairo based on the new proposal of the American agreement, the mediating countries – the USA, Qatar and Egypt – announced yesterday after two days of talks in Doha.
So far, at least 579 people have died, mostly Hezbollah fighters, but also 121 civilians, according to AFP data.
In Israel and the occupied Golan Heights during that period, 22 soldiers and 26 civilians were killed in rocket attacks and shelling from Lebanon, according to Israeli authorities.
Photo: illustration
