In a rare admission, the Israel Defense Forces on Wednesday said it carried out a drone strike in Syria, killing a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative.
According to the IDF, the airstrike on the Syrian side of the Beirut-Damascus highway, near the border between Lebanon and Syria, killed Firas Qasem.
The military said Qasem was a prominent member of Islamic Jihad’s operations unit.
“Qasem was tasked with building operational plans for the PIJ terror organization in Syria and Lebanon, and played a central role in recruiting Palestinian terrorists into the Hezbollah terror organization, for the purpose of carrying out terror operations from Lebanon against the State of Israel,” the IDF said.
The IDF said that in recent years, Hezbollah, with Iranian funding, has been recruiting Palestinians into its ranks to attack Israel.
Two more PIJ operatives were killed in the strike, along with a Hezbollah operative, two security sources told Reuters.
Hezbollah later announced that its member Muhammad Taha, from Baalbek, had been killed “on the road to Jerusalem,” its term for operatives slain in Israeli strikes.
PIJ also announced the deaths of Qasem and two other members, named as Osama Areesha and Hussam Areesha.
The IDF said the four were driving from Syria to Lebanon to carry out operations on behalf of Hezbollah.
The IDF rarely takes responsibility for strikes in Syria.
The Damascus-based Islamic Jihad has sent a stream of fighters from Syria to join Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon. Both groups are supported by Iran. Israel also frequently targets Iran-backed fighters in Syria, although it rarely acknowledges the strikes.
Later on Wednesday, Lebanese media reported a series of Israeli airstrikes near the town of Ain al-Tineh, in the Western Beqaa District, around 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the Israeli border.
Footage posted to social media showed several plumes of smoke rising from a mountain near the town.
Another alleged Israeli strike late Tuesday night hit a pickup truck loaded with Hezbollah missiles that was traveling in northeast Lebanon, some six miles from the city of Baalbek, according to AFP.
One person was wounded in the strike, the health ministry in Lebanon said.
A source close to Hezbollah confirmed the hit Tuesday night, saying: “The munitions that were inside the truck caught fire.”
The IDF said it also carried out an airstrike against a building in southern Lebanon’s Odaisseh on Tuesday, after spotting a cell of Hezbollah operatives there.
The military released footage of the strike.
On Tuesday, a Hezbollah drone lightly wounded one IDF soldier, according to the military, when it was fired from Lebanon and impacted near the northern community of Beit Hillel in the Galilee Panhandle.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.
Israel has been at war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza since October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst into southern Israel from the enclave, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages, amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
So far, the skirmishes with Hezbollah have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 20 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 430 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. Another 76 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and dozens of civilians have been killed.
Early Sunday, Israel destroyed hundreds of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers in an early-morning preemptive strike ahead of the terror group’s planned retaliation for the assassination by Israel late last month of commander Fuad Shukr, whom Israel killed days after a Hezbollah rocket attack killed 12 children and young people in the Golan Heights.
The terror group still managed to fire hundreds of rockets into northern Israel following the preemptive attack, which prevented it from reaching further south.
Israel had been bracing for the attack since Shukr’s assassination, which came just hours before a blast in Tehran killed Ismail Haniyeh, political leader of the Hamas terror group.
Israel has neither claimed nor denied responsibility for Haniyeh’s death, but Iran vowed to retaliate against Israel for the killing on its soil.
On Tuesday, America’s top general said that the exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah on Sunday eased somewhat the risk of a regional war breaking out, though Iran’s promised retaliation for the Haniyeh killing still remained on the horizon.
“You had two things you knew were going to happen. One’s already happened. Now it depends on how the second is going to play out,” said Air Force General C.Q. Brown, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on his way back to the United States from Israel after three days in the Middle East.
“How Iran responds will dictate how Israel responds, which will dictate whether there is going to be a broader conflict or not,” he said.