The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a cross-border drone and missile attack in northern Israel on Wednesday that emergency officials said had injured at least 13 people, four of them critically.
Clashes between Israel and Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful regional proxy, have intensified in the wake of Israel’s targeted killing of two Hezbollah commanders. And there are growing fears of a broader conflict between Israel and Tehran, which mounted a wide aerial attack on Israel over the weekend.
Hezbollah said its attack on an Israeli Bedouin border village, Arab al-Aramshe, was in response to the Israeli airstrikes a day earlier which Israel’s military said had killed the commanders. Those strikes triggered a series of retaliatory attacks by Hezbollah on Israeli military bases and barracks.
Hezbollah claimed that the target in the attack on Wednesday was an Israeli military reconnaissance unit. Magen David Adom, the emergency medical service, said 13 people had been hurt, without specifying if any were soldiers.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it had responded to the attack with strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.
For more than six months, Hezbollah and Israel have been locked in an escalating cross-border conflict set off by the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that was led by Hamas, another of Iran’s proxy groups. The fighting has displaced tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border, and in recent months Israeli strikes inside Lebanon have begun to creep deeper into the country’s interior.
Aaron Boxerman and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
