JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said Wednesday that a soldier was killed in rocket fire from Lebanon, while Lebanese official media said three civilians and a Hezbollah fighter were killed in a series of Israeli strikes.
While the rocket fire was not immediately reported, the exchanges raised concerns about a wider conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, which have traded near-daily cross-border fire since the Israel-Hamas war began in October.
The Israeli military said in a statement that Sergeant Omer Sarah Benjo, 20, was killed as a result of a rocket launch from Lebanese territory at a base in northern Israel.
Fighter jets struck a number of “Hezbollah terrorist targets” in several areas of southern Lebanon, including Adshit and Sawwaneh, the military said.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported that Israeli warplanes targeted a house in Sawwaneh with two strikes, “leading to its destruction” and the deaths of three members of the same family, identifying them as a Syrian woman and her 20-year-old child. two and a stepchild, 13.
The NNA said another Israeli attack targeting Adshit killed one person, whom Hezbollah said was one of its fighters, and wounded 10 others, destroyed a building and caused significant damage in the surrounding area.
The agency later announced an unspecified death toll after an “Israeli drone” attacked a residential apartment building in the southern city of Nabatiyeh.
Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency service said seven people were injured in the fire from Lebanon, including five in the city of Safed.
An AFP photographer saw medics and soldiers evacuate an injured person by military helicopter from Ziv Hospital in Safed.
Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi said after a meeting with commanders near the Lebanese border that Israel’s “next campaign will be very offensive and we will use all tools and all capabilities”.
“We continue to intensify strikes and Hezbollah is paying an ever higher price,” he said in a statement.
Senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said on Wednesday that “this aggression … will not go unanswered.”
A day earlier, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said the fire from southern Lebanon would end “when the attack on Gaza ends and there is a ceasefire” between the group’s Palestinian allies Hamas and arch-enemy Israel.
If Israel expands the confrontation, we will do the same, Nasrallah warned.
Tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides of the border due to rising regional tensions.
Fears are growing of another full-scale conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which last fought in 2006.
A spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, Stephane Dujarric, warned that “the recent escalation is truly dangerous and should stop”.
Monitors from the UN mission in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, noted “a disturbing shift in firefights between Israeli armed forces and armed groups in Lebanon,” he added.
The attacks included “targeting areas far from the blue line,” he said, referring to the withdrawal line drawn by the United Nations in 2000 after Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Washington would continue to pursue a “diplomatic path” to resolve cross-border tensions.
“One of our primary objectives since the beginning of this conflict is to ensure that it does not spread,” he added.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that “Hezbollah was firing deeper and deeper into Israel”, adding that the threat from the Iran-backed group had become “acute”.
Cross-border violence has killed at least 248 people on the Lebanese side, most of them Hezbollah fighters, but also 33 civilians, according to the statistics.
On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and six civilians were killed, according to the Israeli military.
