An Israeli strike targeting a house in southern Lebanon on Saturday March 9 killed five people, including three Hezbollah members and a woman, and injured more than nine others, the official Ani agency reported.
The raid completely razed a house located in the town of Kherbet Selm, where a couple and their two children lived. The mother, displaced from the border town of Blida with her husband, was pregnant, the agency specifies. Neighboring houses were violently hit, and all of the injured were transported to hospital, according to the agency. Hezbollah later announced that the father and his two children were party fighters “died as martyrs”.
Since the start of the war on October 7 between Israel and Hamas, there have been almost daily exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of the Palestinian Islamist movement, displacing tens of thousands of people. At least 312 people, most of Hezbollah fighters and 56 civilians, have been killed in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally. In Israel, ten soldiers and seven civilians died.
Incessant clashes between Israel and Hezbollah
If the clashes remain confined to the border regions for the moment, the threats of open war are growing, with several strikes having hit Lebanese territory far from the border in recent weeks, some killing or injuring civilians. On Wednesday, three people, two Hezbollah fighters and a woman, were killed in an Israeli strike that razed their house in the border town of Houla. And on February 21, a woman and a little girl died in an Israeli raid targeting their house.
In mid-February, the leader of the pro-Iranian party, Hassan Nasrallah, promised to make Israel pay “by blood” the price of civilians killed in Lebanon, a few days after seven members of the same family, but also a woman and two children were killed in Israeli strikes.
On Saturday, Hezbollah also claimed several operations against Israeli military positions on the border. The group repeats that it will only stop its attacks against Israel with a ceasefire in Gaza. But Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently warned that a possible truce in Gaza would not “the objective” of Israel to push Hezbollah from its northern border, by force or diplomacy.