The Israeli military said on Wednesday, February 14, that a soldier was killed in rocket fire from Lebanon, while Lebanese official media said three civilians and a Hezbollah fighter were killed in a series of Israeli strikes. The Israeli raids targeted several locations in south Lebanon, around 10 to 25 kilometers from the Israeli border.
While the rocket fire was not immediately claimed, the intense exchanges of fire further raised fears of a broader conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, which have been trading near daily cross-border fire since the Israel-Hamas war began in October.
The Israeli army said in a statement Sergeant Omer Sarah Benjo, 20, was killed "as a result of a [rocket] launch carried out from Lebanese territory on a base in northern Israel." Fighter jets struck a series of "Hezbollah terror targets" in several areas of south Lebanon including Souaneh and Aadchit, the military said.
Lebanon's state-run National News Agency (NNA) said Israeli warplanes targeted a house in Souaneh with two strikes, "leading to its destruction" and the death of three members of the same family. It identified the dead as a Syrian woman and two children, aged 13 and two. The NNA also said an Israeli attack targeting south Lebanon's Aadchit killed one person, who Hezbollah announced was one of its fighters, and wounded 10 others, "completely destroying" a building and causing "great damage to commercial establishments, shops and homes" nearby.
Israel's Magen David Adom emergency service had said seven people were wounded in fire from Lebanon, five of them in the town of Safed. An Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer saw medics and troops evacuating a wounded person by military helicopter from Safed's Ziv hospital.
Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi said after meeting commanders near the Lebanese border that Israel's "next campaign will be very much on the offensive, and we will use all the tools and all capabilities." "We are intensifying the strikes all the time, and Hezbollah are paying an increasingly heavy price," he said in a statement.
Senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said Wednesday that "this aggression[...] will not go unanswered."
A day earlier, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said that fire from southern Lebanon would end "when the attack on Gaza stops and there is a ceasefire" between the group's Palestinian allies Hamas and arch-foe Israel. "If they [Israel] broaden the confrontation, we will do the same," Nasrallah warned in a televised address.
Fears have been growing of another full-blown conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which last went to war in 2006. "I don't know when the war in the north is, I can tell you that the likelihood of it happening in the coming months is much higher than it was in the past," Halevi said last month.
The cross-border violence has killed at least 248 people on the Lebanese side, most of them Hezbollah fighters but also including 33 civilians, according to an AFP tally. On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and six civilians have been killed, according to the Israeli army.