Beirut:

Hezbollah said it fired “dozens” of rockets into northern Israel on Thursday in retaliation for a deadly strike in south Lebanon, a day after a fiery speech from the group’s leader.

Israel and Hezbollah, a powerful Lebanese movement allied with Hamas, have traded near-daily cross-border fire since the Palestinian group’s October 7 attack on Israel which triggered war in the Gaza Strip.

Fears of a regional war surged after Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah warned on Wednesday that “no place” in Israel would be spared in the event of all-out war against his group, and threatened the nearby island nation of Cyprus if it opened its airports to Israel.

Hezbollah on Thursday said that “in response to the assassination that the Israeli enemy carried out in the village of Deir Kifa”, fighters targeted an Israeli barracks “with dozens of Katyusha rockets”.

Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) had reported one dead after an “enemy drone” struck a vehicle in south Lebanon’s Deir Kifa area.

Hezbollah announced that one of its fighters was killed. A source close to the group, requesting anonymity, told AFP he was killed in the Deir Kifa strike.

The Israeli military said an air strike “eliminated” a Hezbollah operative in the Deir Kifa area, saying he was “responsible for planning and carrying out terror attacks against Israel and commanding Hezbollah ground forces” in south Lebanon’s Jouaiyya area.

Elsewhere, Israeli fighter jets struck “a Hezbollah surface-to-air missile launcher that posed a threat to aircraft operating over Lebanon”, the army statement added.

Hezbollah claimed several other attacks on Israeli troops and positions on Thursday, while the NNA reported further Israeli strikes in south Lebanon.

‘Stop the firing’

The exchanges between the foes, which last went to war in 2006, have escalated in recent weeks, and the Israeli military said Tuesday that “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon were approved and validated”.

After the Hezbollah leader’s threats against Cyprus, Lebanon’s foreign ministry said on Thursday that “relations between Lebanon and Cyprus are based on a rich history of diplomatic cooperation”.

Contacts and consultations continue between the two countries “at the highest levels”, a foreign ministry statement said, without making specific reference to Nasrallah’s remarks.

In a conversation with his Cyprus counterpart, Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib expressed “Lebanon’s constant reliance on the positive role that Cyprus plays in supporting regional stability”, the NNA reported.

Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and British Foreign Secretary David Cameron discussed bilateral relations “and the situation in Lebanon and the region” in a telephone call, the premier’s office said in a statement.

Also on Thursday, the United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert said there was “no inevitability to conflict” as she visited UN peacekeepers deployed in the Lebanese border town of Naqura.

“It is crucial for all sides to stop the firing and for the parties to commit to sustainable solutions in line with Security Council Resolution 1701,” she said in a statement.

The resolution ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah and called for the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers to be the only armed forces deployed in the country’s south.

The cross-border violence since October has killed at least 479 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters but also including 93 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

Israeli authorities say at least 15 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed in the country’s north.

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Beirut:

A local official in Lebanon and state media said an Israeli strike Sunday on a southern village killed several family members, with Hezbollah fighters announcing rocket fire in retaliation.

Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group have exchanged regular cross-border fire since Palestinian group Hamas’s unprecedented October attack on southern Israel sparked the war in Gaza.

Fighting has intensified in recent weeks, with Israel striking deeper into Lebanese territory, while Hezbollah has stepped up its missile and drone attacks on military positions in northern Israel.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said the strike in Mais al-Jabal killed “four people from a single family”, updating an earlier reported death count of three dead in the raid it said was carried out by Israeli aircraft.

It identified them as a man, a woman and their children aged 12 and 21, and said two other people were wounded.

A Lebanese security source, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media, confirmed the strike killed “four civilians”.

Mais al-Jabal municipality chief Abdelmoneim Shukair had earlier told AFP that three people were killed, saying they were a couple and their son.

Hezbollah in a statement said it fired “dozens of Katyusha and Falaq rockets” at Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel “in response to the horrific crime that the Israeli enemy committed in Mais al-Jabal”.

It later said it fired dozens more Katyusha rockets at Israeli troops and vehicles across the border “as part of the response” to the Mais al-Jabal strike.

The Israeli army told AFP that “about 40 rockets were identified crossing” from Lebanon, “some of which were intercepted”.

“At the moment, no casualties have been reported,” it added.

Hezbollah has repeatedly declared that only a ceasefire in Gaza will put an end to its attacks on Israel, which it says are in support of Gazans and its ally Hamas.

Both the United States and France have made diplomatic efforts to calm tensions on the Lebanese-Israeli border.

In Lebanon, at least 390 people have been killed in nearly seven months of cross-border violence, mostly militants but also more than 70 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

Israel says 11 soldiers and nine civilians have been killed on its side of the border.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced on both sides.

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Beirut:

Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group said it launched a drone and missile attack on an Israeli base on Wednesday in response to strikes that killed three Hezbollah fighters the day before.

Israel and Hamas ally Hezbollah have been exchanging near-daily cross-border fire since the Palestinian group attacked southern Israel on October 7, triggering war in the Gaza Strip.

But Wednesday’s incident marked the third day in a row that Hezbollah strikes wounded people in Israel, with regional tensions high after Iran launched a direct attack on Israel over the weekend in retaliation for a deadly strike on Tehran’s Damascus consulate.

Hezbollah said it launched “a combined attack with guided missiles and explosive drones on a new military reconnaissance command centre in Arab al-Aramshe,” an Arab-majority village of northern Israel.

The attack came “in response to the enemy assassinating a number of resistance fighters in Ain Baal and Shehabiya” on Tuesday, the movement said.

Magen David Adom, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, said six people had been injured after a strike in Western Galilee.

The six injured are “men in their 30s, including: 1 in serious condition,” the rescuers said on X, formerly Twitter.

The Israeli army said “a number of launches from Lebanon were identified crossing into the area of Arab al-Aramshe,” adding that it struck the sources of the fire.

On Tuesday, Israel said its strikes in south Lebanon killed two local Hezbollah commanders and another operative, with the Iran-backed group saying three of its members were killed as it launched rockets in retaliation.

Local Israeli authorities said three people were wounded in a strike from Lebanon earlier that day.

On Monday, Hezbollah targeted Israeli troops with explosive devices, wounding four soldiers who crossed into Lebanese territory, the first such attack in six months of clashes.

The violence has killed at least 368 people in Lebanon, mostly Hezbollah fighters but also at least 70 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

In Israel, the military says 10 soldiers and eight civilians have been killed near the northern border since hostilities began.

Tens of thousands of civilians have fled their homes on both sides of the border, with the violence fuelling fears of all-out conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, which last went to war in 2006.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Beirut:

An Israeli strike on a truck in Syria near the Lebanese border killed two Hezbollah members at dawn on Sunday, a war monitor said.

“Israel struck a civilian truck with a missile near the Syrian-Lebanese border,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a report.

The strike led to “the death of at least two Hezbollah members”, said the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources in Syria.

Hezbollah later announced in separate statements that two of its fighters were “martyred on the road to Jerusalem”, the phrase it uses to refer to members killed by Israeli fire.

A source close to Hezbollah confirmed that both were killed this morning in Syria.

Syrian state media did not report the strike.

Since Syria’s civil war began in 2011 following an uprising against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Israel has launched hundreds of air strikes in Syria, primarily against pro-Iran forces, among them Hezbollah and the Syrian army.

The strikes have multiplied amidst the ongoing war in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas.

An Israeli strike on a Damascus residential neighbourhood on Wednesday killed three Iran-backed fighters, a Syrian and two foreigners, according to the Observatory.

On February 10, the Observatory reported an Israeli strike on a building west of Damascus that killed three people from pro-Iran militias.

Since the start of the war in Gaza on October 7, Hezbollah has announced the death of 16 members killed by Israeli strikes in Syria.

The Israeli military announced on February 3 that it had “attacked, from the ground and air, more than 50 such targets of Hezbollah spread throughout Syria”.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes but has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran to expand its presence in Syria.

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Rmeich, Lebanon:

At Lebanon’s border with Israel, residents of a Christian village are hoping war can be avoided even as they prepare for the possibility of worsening hostilities between the Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah and Israel.

Located just a couple of kilometres (miles) from the frontier, the village of Rmeich has already suffered fallout from three weeks of clashes along the border between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, the dominant force in south Lebanon.

Half of its residents have fled north since shells began crashing into hills nearby. With the olive harvest disrupted, their livelihoods have also been affected by south Lebanon’s worst violence since Hezbollah and Israel went to war in 2006.

The village, along with the rest of Lebanon, is feeling the turbulence unleashed by the conflict raging some 200 km away between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, an ally of the heavily armed Hezbollah.

Those who remain in Rmeich appear reluctant to discuss the politics of the crisis that has brought conflict to their doorstep, trying to preserve some normalcy in the village whose 18th century church still holds a mass three times a day.

“I won’t say we’re feeling safe but the situation is stable,” the village priest Toni Elias, 40, said as a military drone buzzed overhead.

“If we don’t hear the drone, we think something odd is going on. We’re used to it everyday, 24/7,” Elias said.

Rmeich is one of around a dozen or more Christian villages near the border with Israel in predominantly Shi’ite Muslim south Lebanon. During the 2006 war, some 25,000 people from surrounding towns sought shelter in Rmeich.

Memories of the 2006 conflict loom large. Rmeich locals and charities have set up a makeshift hospital at a school, in case the clashes between Hezbollah and Israel – so far largely contained to areas at the border – get worse.

“We won’t use it unless there is a war and roads get closed, and inshalla (God willing) this won’t happen,” said Georges Madi, a doctor from the village.

WAR AND PEACE

The tensions are weighing on the local economy, compounding hardship for people still suffering the effects of Lebanon’s devastating financial collapse four years ago.

“If the war is prolonged, we can’t stay here. There is no work or money,” said Charbel Al Alam, 58, who makes his living from farming tobacco, historically an important industry for south Lebanon.

“In the 2006 war, tobacco plants dried out in the fields and no one was able to harvest it. No one compensated us,” he said.

While farmers had been able to gather this year’s crop, they worry whether they will be able plant next year’s. Business in Rmeich has generally come to a halt, several local said.

Unlike the surrounding areas, there is no sign of the yellow and green Hezbollah flag in Rmeich.

While avoiding any criticism of Hezbollah, Rmeich mayor Milad Al Alam said the Lebanese army should be the sole military force in Lebanon – a view voiced by Hezbollah’s opponents who say its arsenal has undermined the state.

“We wish the decision of war and peace were in our hands. If it were, the situation would have been different,” he said.

The town has no shelter or official evacuation plan for its 4,500 remaining residents if war intensifies, he added. “People were stuck in the village for 17 days in 2006,” he said.

Elias, the priest, said he was confident Rmeich would not be hit: “As long we’re here, living in the village. We don’t want war, we’re a peaceful village … so the village remains safe if others flee to it.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)