BERIUT: A Lebanese security source said six Hezbollah fighters were killed in Israeli strikes on Tuesday, with the group claiming attacks on northern Israel and low-flying Israeli warplanes breaking the sound barrier over Beirut.
Hezbollah has exchanged fire almost daily with Israel in support of its ally Hamas since the Palestinian militant group's Oct. 7 attack on Israel sparked the Gaza war.
Tensions have risen in the past week as Iran and its allies vowed revenge for the killing, blamed on Israel, of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, and after an Israeli strike killed Hezbollah's top military commander , Fuad Shukr, in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Lebanon's Health Ministry said a “raid by the Israeli enemy on a house in the town of Mayfadun”, near the southern town of Nabatiyeh, killed five people, while another Israeli strike in the Adaysseh area killed one person.
The dead in both locations were “Hezbollah fighters”, a security source told AFP, requesting anonymity because the matter is sensitive.
Hezbollah announced that five fighters were killed, without specifying where they died.
The Israeli military said its air force “struck a Hezbollah military structure” in the Nabatiyeh area, which was being used “to advance terrorist attacks” against Israel.
Hezbollah claimed several attacks on Israeli positions on Tuesday, including one with “explosive-laden drones” targeting a barracks north of the coastal city of Acre.
The Israeli military said “a number of hostile UAVs (drones) were identified crossing from Lebanon,” adding that “several civilians were injured south of Nahariya,” near Acre.
It later said an initial investigation indicated one of its interceptor missiles “missed its target and hit the ground, injuring several civilians,” adding that “the incident is under review.”
Israel's Magen David Adom emergency service said paramedics were treating “a 30-year-old man in serious condition and a 30-year-old woman in mild to moderate condition with shrapnel wounds.”
Hezbollah said the drone strike was in response to an airstrike on the southern village of Ebba, which the Israeli military said targeted a commander of the group's elite Radwan force.
Low-flying Israeli military jets broke the sound barrier in Beirut on Tuesday ahead of a speech by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, Lebanon's National News Agency said, a security source and AFP journalists said.
Nasrallah was giving a televised speech a week after the killing of Shukr, whom Israel described as the group's “highest military commander” and Nasrallah's “right-hand man”.
Cross-border violence since October has killed an estimated 556 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters, but also including at least 116 civilians, according to an AFP tally.
On the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, 22 soldiers and 25 civilians were killed, according to army figures.
Diplomatic efforts have gone into overdrive to avoid a regional conflagration and full-blown conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which last went to war in the summer of 2006.
