People inspect the rubble of a house where a Hezbollah member and his family were killed in Israeli bombardment.
| Photo Credit: AFP
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah said on March 12 it launched more than 100 rockets at Israeli military positions in retaliation for a strike on the country’s east that killed one person the day before.
Hamas ally Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged near-daily cross-border fire since the Gaza war erupted in October, but several Israeli strikes have recently hit Hezbollah positions further north, raising fears of a full-blown conflict.
“Hezbollah launched “more than a hundred katyusha rockets” on Tuesday morning at two military bases in the occupied Golan Heights,” the group said in a statement. This was “in response to the Israeli attacks on our people, villages and cities, most recently near the city of Baalbek and the killing of a citizen”, it added.
On Monday, Israeli air strikes near Lebanon’s eastern city of Baalbek killed one person, in the second raid on the Hezbollah stronghold since cross-border hostilities began. The Israeli military confirmed its jets had hit two sites belonging to “Hezbollah’s aerial forces” in retaliation for strikes on the occupied Golan Heights over several days.
On February 26, Israeli strikes targeted Baalbek, some 100 km (60 miles) from the border, killing two Hezbollah members. Earlier on Tuesday, Hezbollah said its chief Hassan Nasrallah met with Khalil al-Hayya, a leading member of Hamas’s political bureau.
They discussed ceasefire talks for the Gaza war, as well as attacks by Hamas’s regional allies to support its war efforts, the Hezbollah statement said. Nasrallah is due to give a televised speech on Wednesday. Hezbollah has repeatedly said it will only stop its attacks on Israel with a ceasefire in Gaza.
But Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant recently said any truce in Gaza would not change Israel’s goal of pushing Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, by force or diplomacy.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, at least 317 people, mainly Hezbollah fighters but also 54 civilians, have been killed in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally. In Israel, at least 10 soldiers and seven civilians have been killed in the cross-border hostilities.