BEIRUT: A barrage of Israeli strikes on villages across southern Lebanon on Wednesday killed four people and wounded nearly a dozen, two Lebanese Security Forces said, as Israel intensified its bombardment in retaliation for rocketfire from Lebanon.
A woman and her two children were killed in an Israeli strike on the village of al-Sawana, the officials said. Lebanon’s powerful armed group Hezbollah said a strike on a separate town killed one of its fighters.
Eleven people were wounded across the south and the level of damage was “vast”, foreign agencies said. Israel’s military said on Wednesday it had responded to cross-border rocket fire from Lebanon. A rocket attack from Lebanon killed an Israeli woman in a barrage that also hit a military base and wounded several people on Wednesday, an Israeli government spokesperson said.
Hezbollah head Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address on Tuesday that his group would only stop its exchanges of fire if a full ceasefire was reached for Gaza.
“On that day, when the shooting stops in Gaza, we will stop the shooting in the south,” he said. The cross-border shelling has already killed more than 200 people in Lebanon, including more than 170 Hezbollah fighters, as well as around a dozen Israeli troops and some Israeli civilians. It has also displaced tens of thousands of people in the border areas of each country. –Agencies
