Middle East: Hezbollah fires dozens of rockets at Israel after killing civilians

Lebanese Islamist movement Hezbollah announced Tuesday night that it had fired dozens of rockets into northern Israel in retaliation for the deaths of two civilians in southern Lebanon in a strike blamed on Israel.

Hezbollah fired “dozens of Katyusha rockets” into northern Israel “in response to attacks by the Israeli enemy (…) on civilian homes, especially the Hanina massacre and the deaths of civilians,” the movement said in a press release.

A woman and a 12-year-old girl were killed.

Earlier in the day, rescue workers and Lebanese media reported that an Israeli strike killed a woman and a 12-year-old girl from the same family in southern Lebanon, where gunfire exchanges daily between the Israeli army and Hezbollah.

Lebanese official news agency ANI confirmed the deaths, adding that “six more people were injured in an enemy airstrike on a house in Hanina,” near the Israeli border. “Enemy warplanes hit the two-storey house with two air-to-surface missiles, which completely destroyed it,” ANI reported. In this house, according to the agency, lived “a family that has not fled since the start of the Israeli attacks.”

Return fire

Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, has exchanged fire with Israel daily since the war in the Gaza Strip began on October 7. Tens of thousands of people have fled communities on both sides of the border.

Earlier, Hezbollah announced that it had “carried out an air attack” using drones on two Israeli military positions north of the city of Acre in “response to the killing” of one of its members in the morning.

According to AFP, firefights between Israel and Hezbollah have killed 380 people on the Lebanese side since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, mostly militants from the Lebanese movement, as well as 72 civilians. Eleven soldiers and eight civilians were killed in northern Israel, according to the army.