The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a cross-border drone and missile attack in northern Israel on Wednesday that the Israeli military said had injured 14 soldiers, six of them severely.
It was one of the most damaging attacks in recent months by Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful regional proxy, in its continuing clashes with Israel. The clashes have intensified in the wake of Israel’s targeted killing of two Hezbollah commanders. And there are growing fears of a broader conflict between Israel and Tehran, which mounted a wide aerial attack on Israel over the weekend.
Hezbollah said its attack on an Israeli Bedouin border village, Arab al-Aramshe, was in response to the Israeli airstrikes a day earlier that Israel’s military said had killed the commanders. Those strikes triggered a series of retaliatory attacks by Hezbollah on Israeli military bases and barracks.
Hezbollah claimed that the target in the attack on Wednesday was an Israeli military reconnaissance unit. The military said that six soldiers had been severely injured, two moderately injured and six lightly injured. It said it had responded to the attack with strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.
For more than six months, Hezbollah and Israel have been locked in an escalating cross-border conflict set off by the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that was led by Hamas, another of Iran’s proxy groups. The fighting has displaced tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border, and in recent months Israeli strikes inside Lebanon have begun to creep deeper into the country’s interior.
Aaron Boxerman, Johnatan Reiss and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.