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Hezbollah Fires Rockets Into Israel After Deadly Strikes

Hezbollah members prepare a Katyusha rocket launcher (Capture from Hezbollah video)
Hezbollah members prepare a Katyusha rocket launcher (Capture from Hezbollah video)
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Hezbollah Fires Rockets Into Israel After Deadly Strikes

Hezbollah members prepare a Katyusha rocket launcher (Capture from Hezbollah video)
Hezbollah members prepare a Katyusha rocket launcher (Capture from Hezbollah video)

Lebanon's Hezbollah on Sunday said it had fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel after Israeli strikes the day before left five dead in southern Lebanon, including three of the group's members.

Hamas ally Hezbollah and its arch-foe Israel have been exchanging near-daily fire across the border since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7.

Hezbollah said it had launched "dozens of katyusha-type rockets" in the morning on the Israeli village of Meron, eight kilometres (five miles) from the border.

Meron is home to a major air control base that the Iran-backed group has targeted several times since the start of the year.

Hezbollah said it had acted "in response to Israeli attacks against villages in the south and the homes of civilians", particularly the targeting of the home of a fighter in Kherbet Selm the day before, AFP reported.

A woman and another person were also killed in the same strike, according to Lebanon's official National News Agency.

"Following the sirens that sounded in northern Israel, approximately 35 launches from Lebanon toward Israeli territory were identified, a number of which were intercepted," the Israeli army said on Sunday.

The statement added that the Israeli air force struck Hezbollah infrastructure during the night, including a "military structure in which Hezbollah militants were identified in the area of Khirbet Selm".

At least 312 people have been killed in Lebanon since the start of cross-border violence on October 8, most of them Hezbollah fighters but also including 53 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and seven civilians have been killed, according to the latest official figures.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the fighting on both sides of the border.

Strikes have largely remained confined to border regions for the moment, but several have hit Hezbollah positions further north in recent weeks, raising fears of a full-blown conflict.

The group has repeatedly said that it will only stop its attacks on Israel with a ceasefire in Gaza.

But Israeli Defene Minister Yoav Gallant said recently that any truce in Gaza would not change Israel's goal of pushing Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, by force or diplomacy.

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Security Council Extends Arms Embargo on Darfur

FILE PHOTO: Members of the United Nations Security Council gather during a meeting about the situation in Venezuela, in New York, US, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
FILE PHOTO: Members of the United Nations Security Council gather during a meeting about the situation in Venezuela, in New York, US, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
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Security Council Extends Arms Embargo on Darfur

FILE PHOTO: Members of the United Nations Security Council gather during a meeting about the situation in Venezuela, in New York, US, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
FILE PHOTO: Members of the United Nations Security Council gather during a meeting about the situation in Venezuela, in New York, US, February 26, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

The UN Security Council extended an arms embargo on Sudan's Darfur region for another year, after experts said it had been regularly violated amid the ongoing civil war.

In a resolution adopted unanimously, the Council extended until September 12, 2025 the sanctions regime in place since 2005, which is aimed solely at Darfur, AFP reported.

That includes individual sanctions -- asset freezes and a travel ban -- on three people, and an arms embargo.

The "people of Darfur continue to live in danger and desperation and despair ... This adoption sends an important signal to them that the international community remains focused on their plight," said deputy US ambassador Robert Wood.

Though sanctions do not apply to the whole country, their renewal "will restrict the movement of arms into Darfur and sanction individuals and entities contributing to or complicit in destabilizing activities in Sudan," he said.

More than 16 months of war between rival Sudanese generals has killed tens of thousands of people and triggered what the United Nations calls the world's worst internal displacement crisis.

The war pits the army under Sudan's de facto leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the RSF, led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

The UN and humanitarian organizations fear that the war could degenerate into new ethnic violence, particularly in Darfur.

Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the decision was a "missed opportunity" by the Council to extend the embargo to the whole of Sudan.

China and Russia, permanent members of the Security Council who abstained the last time the embargo was renewed, in 2023, this time voted in favor.

The move "will go some way towards stemming the steady flow of illicit arms into the battlefield and calming down and deescalating the situation on the ground," said deputy Chinese ambassador Dai Bing.

He said the sanctions were "a means, not an end. They must not replace diplomacy."

In their annual report, published in January, experts charged by the Council with monitoring the sanctions regime said the arms embargo had been violated multiple times.