At least 11 people were killed in Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon yesterday, the Lebanese health ministry said, one of the deadliest in the weeks since the country agreed to a US-mediated peace framework with neighbouring Israel.
The Israeli military said it struck Hizbollah infrastructure overnight in what it describes as a security zone in southern Lebanon in response to actions against its soldiers there.
Iran-backed Hizbollah said in a statement that the attacks would be “met with what they deserve”. The framework leaves Israeli troops inside occupied southern Lebanon until Hizbollah is disarmed and the Lebanese army takes control, terms the group has rejected as surrender.
Lebanon’s official National News Agency said seven people were killed when Israeli warplanes struck a house in the southern village of Ansar, while four others were killed in a strike on the village of Deir El Zahrani.
The seven people killed in Ansar included three children and two women, the NNA said, adding that a total of 19 people were wounded in the attacks.
At least 4,300 people have been killed in Lebanon in the latest round of hostilities since March 2.
The NNA also reported other air strikes across southern Lebanon, including on a strategic area north of the Litani River known as Ali al-Taher hill. One, targeting a valley next to Ansar, was the deepest strike into Lebanon in two months.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a statement on X, accused Hizbollah of violating the ceasefire and attacking Israeli soldiers leading to three injuries.
The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) responded by striking the Hizbollah headquarters which ordered the attack, the statement said. “Only later did the IDF learn that Hizbollah deliberately put civilians in that military compound.”
The Israeli military said in a statement it killed Ali Samir Al-Haj Hassan, a commander in Hizbollah’s elite Radwan Force unit and others when it struck “a central headquarters of the Radwan Force unit,” in Ansar.
“At the time of the strike, Hassan’s family was also present with him and, according to the claim, was harmed in the strike,” the statement added, emphasising that the family was not the target of the strike.
“The martyrs in Ansar are not ‘military infrastructure’ and the women and children killed in it are not military targets,” Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said in a post on X.
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