Lebanon’s Hezbollah said it launched a drone attack early Monday on northern Israel that the Israeli military said wounded two troops and set off a fire.
The violence came as fears of an all-out regional war mount following the killings last week of a senior Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and Hamas’ top political leader in Iran.
Hezbollah said in a statement it targeted a military base in northern Israel in response to “attacks and assassinations” carried out by Israel in several villages in south Lebanon.
The attack did not appear to be part of a more intense retaliation expected in response to the killing of Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur in Beirut’s southern suburbs last week.
The Israeli military said fire services were working to put out a fire that was ignited as a result of the attack in Ayelet HaShahar in the upper Galilee.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said Monday an Israeli drone strike near a cemetery in a southern village killed two people, including a paramedic.
The agency did not give further details about the morning strike in the village of Meissa al-Jabal. It said one of the dead was a member of the Islamic Risala Scout Association paramedic group. The group identified the member killed as Mohammed Fawzi Hamadi.
Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged near-daily strikes for the past 10 months against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, but they have previously kept the conflict at a low level that had not escalated into full-on war.
Last week’s assassinations of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran’s capital, Tehran, and Shukur in Beirut raised tensions in the region. Israel has been bracing for a retaliation from Iran and its allied militias.
