Lebanese militant group Hezbollah launched an intense bombardment of Israeli positions on the volatile border on Monday, triggering retaliatory Israeli air strikes, with one person reportedly killed.
The Shi’ite movement’s al-Manar television said one person had been killed and two wounded, but there was no immediate word on casualties from the Israeli army.
The television said nine military vehicles, including a tank, were hit and an Israeli position destroyed, but Israeli military sources said the attack was repulsed with losses on the Hezbollah side.
Lebanese police said Hezbollah had fired as many as 300 shells in the space of an hour in the disputed border region of Shebaa Farms.
Israeli sources said the bombardment followed an attack on the village of Ghajar, where the majority of residents opted to take Israeli nationality after Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967.
The flare-up came on the eve of Lebanon’s independence day and amid political turmoil in Israel following Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s call for early elections he plans to contest at the head of a new centrist party.
Israeli jets fired missiles on three suspected Hezbollah positions, one on the outskirts of Ghajar and two some distance away — south of the village of Khiam, and south-east of the port city of Tyre.
Israeli artillery gunners also retaliated while aircraft overflew south Lebanon as far north as Tyre, in defiance of repeated United Nations calls for an end to violations of Lebanese air space.
Police and correspondents for news agency AFP on the Lebanese side of the border said that the fierce exchanges, which erupted at about 3pm local time, raged for about two hours before subsiding — the biggest flare-up since July.
Israeli military sources said Hezbollah missiles landed in Kiryat Shmona and Metula, with at least one projectile fired into the area of Kibbutz Snir, without specifying whether it was a mortar round or a Katyusha rocket.
Residents were urged to take refuge in bomb shelters, they added.
The attacks came two weeks after Israeli artillery batteries opened fire in the disputed area.
The Shebaa Farms have remained a source of tension ever since Israel ended its 22-year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.
The area was captured by Israel from Syria in 1967 but is now claimed by Lebanon with Syrian consent. The arrangement is not recognised by the UN, which maintains a peacekeeping force on the Lebanese side of the frontier. — Sapa-AFP