The Lebanese Red Cross said Thursday that an Israeli strike killed four of its paramedics and a Lebanese army soldier as they were evacuating wounded people from the south.
It said the convoy near the village of Taybeh, which was accompanied by Lebanese troops, was targeted despite coordinating its movements with UN peacekeepers.
An escalation in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah over the past two weeks has led to clashes between the two sides inside Lebanon.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel at the start of the Gaza war in support of Hamas, causing the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents whom Israel says need to return home.
In Lebanon, nearly 1,900 people have been killed and more than 9,000 wounded in Lebanon in nearly a year of cross-border fighting, with most of the deaths occurring in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese government statistics.
More than a million Lebanese have been forced to flee their homes.
In a separate development, the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of villages and towns in southern Lebanon that are north of a United Nations-declared buffer zone established after the 2006 war. The warnings issued Thursday signaled a possible broadening of Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon, which until now has been confined to areas close to the border.
At least eight Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, where Israel announced the start of what it says is a limited ground incursion earlier this week.
