An apparent Israeli drone strike in Syria on Tuesday prompted the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah to respond with rocket fire into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the group said, an attack that killed two people as fears continued to mount over the threat of a full-scale war.
Hezbollah said in a statement that it had targeted an Israeli military base as a direct response to what it called an “assassination” in Syria earlier in the day. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, reported on Tuesday that two Hezbollah members had been killed in an Israeli drone strike on their vehicle close to the Lebanese border. The driver of the vehicle, a Syrian national, was also injured in the strike, the war monitor said.
Neither Hezbollah nor the Israeli military said whether anyone had been killed in the strike, and Israel had not claimed responsibility by Tuesday night. But the Israeli military has ramped up airstrikes in Syria since the war began in Gaza last year — often targeting Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups who have entrenched themselves across the country.
The Israeli police said that a man and woman were killed in the Hezbollah rocket barrage that followed and that fire crews were working to extinguish several blazes that broke out in the area. It was not immediately clear if the victims were civilians or active-duty soldiers.
The Israeli military said a total of 40 projectiles had been launched across the Lebanese border into the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau bordering Syria that Israel annexed nearly 60 years ago.
The latest tit-for-tat strikes between Hezbollah and Israel came amid intensifying efforts by the Biden administration to contain the conflict and prevent an all-out war. Still, numerous rounds of shuttle diplomacy have failed to quell rising tensions, with Hezbollah stressing repeatedly that violence will continue along Israel’s northern border as long as the war in Gaza persists.
Hezbollah began firing into northern Israel in solidarity with the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 that precipitated the war in Gaza. More than 150,000 Israelis and Lebanese have so far been forced to flee their homes along the border, with no indication of when they may be able to return.
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